Florida:

• a state owned and operated by banks, builders and real estate developers… (p.262)
• where developers and bankers bought the politicians who ran the government. The state was urbanising itself faster than any other place on the planet, faster than any other place in the history of man. Each day 450 acres of wild forest disappeared beneath bulldozers across Florida… (p.281)

I think the scale of the corruption and greed which characterises American economic, financial and political life is difficult for English people to really grasp. Just as the state communism of the Soviet bloc penetrated every level of society and deep into people’s souls, so America’s hyper-developed consumer capitalism shapes and colours every aspect of American lives. They are surrounded by branding and products and bombarded via every conceivable medium with messages ramming home the idea that the only values which count are commercial values.

This is an ostensibly comic novel, and it is often very funny, savagely, sometimes brutally funny; but its depiction of corruption and philistine greed at every level of American society is worked out in great detail and is terrifyingly plausible. Nothing happens which isn’t motivated by power, money or lust.

Pork was the essential nutrient of politics. Somebody always made money, even from the most noble-sounding of tax-supported endeavours. (p.50)

The Toad Island property development

At the heart of this novel, as of so many of the other Hiaasen stories, is a crooked property deal: on the north-west coast of Florida is an unspoilt island named Toad Island because of the proliferation of tiny, orange-backed toads which swarm over it. As always, the plot is complicated, falling into half a dozen distinct but complexly inter-related storylines, which follow the tangled activities of about 15 or so characters:

Robert Clapley

Robert Clapley is a crooked property developer. Aged 35, he has ‘Yuppie ex-smuggler written all over him’ (p.39). He has bought up Toad Island and plans to turn it into yet another shiny resort development, complete with 16-story condos, a golf course, beachfront restaurants etc. He wants to Americanise i.e. ruin it. It will be renamed Shearwater Island.

Ordinarily Clapley would fund a development with laundered drug money from cocaine and marijuana imports, which is what he did with his previous project, laundering the money through a Dutch holding company (p.313). But the Shearwater Island development is his most ambitious and so he’s been forced to seek funding from legitimate sources (well, banks, if you consider most international banks legitimate businesses, instead of fronts for money laundering activities of drug cartels, Russian billionaires, Arab sheikhs and African dictators).

In order to enforce his interests and persuade people to do what he wants, Clapley employs Mr Gash, a stocky sadist who wears a houndstooth suit and has spiky English punk hair. At one stage he ties up someone Mr Clapley isn’t happy with and forces a live rat into their mouth. Later on, he tries to murder the hero and rape the heroine. He is not a nice man.

Because almost everyone in a Hiaasen novel is a grotesque, a caricature, an extreme, Mr Gash is given a grotesque hobby. He has used underworld connections to get hold of bootleg tapes of 911 emergency calls, i.e. the phone calls people make at extreme moments just before they die. So far, so sick, but, being Hiaasen, Mr Gash has taken this much further and mashed up the tapes with classical music. Thus he enjoys driving round with his sound system cranked up full, listening to the screams down the phone of a man whose wife tied him to a bed then set his hair on fire, then rang 911 so his last minutes of agony could be recorded — all set to elegant Mozart music.

Speaking of the grotesque and extreme, Robert Clapley, the yuppie, ex-drug smuggling property developer is not only a crook, he has a bizarre kink. Sure, he takes drugs and screws hookers, that comes as standard; but recently he was introduced to two statuesque dolly birds from Eastern Europe, Katya and Tish, and has personally arranged their visas so they can stay on in the Land of the Free and enjoy his seafront apartment, jacuzzi and cocaine. But Clapley has a secret passion: when he was a boy he played with his sisters’ Barbie dolls and developed a sexual fetish for them. He carries Barbies round in his pockets, even when he’s terrorising customers. Now he has conceived the idea of surgically altering the two Slav girls so that they both end up looking like Barbies. If they want to stay in the US of A, the girls have to agree. As Clapley reasonably explains:

‘How often in a guy’s lifetime does he have a chance to get sucked off by two semi-identical six-foot dolls?’ (p.137)

Governor Artemus

Clapley has for many years made donations to the funds of Florida’s governor, handsome former-Toyota car salesman, Dick Artemus, which is why, in exchange for a promise of more donations, Artemus has included the $27.7 million cost of replacing the rackety old wooden bridge from the mainland to Toad Island with a 4-lane modern concrete bridge, in his latest budget (p.58). It is one among many items in the annual budget which he can present as ‘modernising’ and ‘developing’ the state, but which are being undertaken entirely to benefit donors, in this case his good friend and political supporter, Robert Capley.

The Toad Island development is being constructed by the prestigious engineering firm of Roothaus and Son (p.40). They’re employing as project supervisor Karl Krimmler. All Hiaasen’s characters are given extensive backstories which are carefully interspersed throughout the text to give the narratives pace and variety. Thus, later in the novel we are told that Krimmler has hated nature ever since his kid brother popped an angry chipmunk down his pants. Ever since, he has wanted to take revenge on the natural world and nothing pleases him more than watching huge earth-moving machinery chopping down forests and filling in ponds and massacring thousands of pesky little orange toads.

So Krimmler doesn’t get on very well with Dr Stephen Brinkman, a biologist fresh out of Cornell Graduate School, who’s taken a $41,000-a-year job with Roothaus as their ‘environmental specialist’ (p.41) which basically means he has to ensure the site of any development is clear of any endangered species or other critters on the various state or federal lists of protected species or habitats, so that Krimmler’s land-razing teams can crack on. Later in the novel, the hitman Mr Gash will shoot dead Brinkman and bury him with a digger.

Willie Vasquez-Washington

But getting the funding of the Toad Island bridge onto Dick Artemus’s budget is only the first step. The budget itself has to be passed by the state legislature and in particular the influential House Appropriations Committee. Chair of this vital committee is Willie Vasquez-Washington, who keeps colleagues unsure whether he has black, Hispanic or native American blood (in order to intimidate them  with his minority credentials and/or secure a rake-off from state funding supposedly targeted at ‘minorities’).

Willie will only pass the governor’s budget through the committee if he receives a slice of the action. To be precise, he demands that $9 million be found from somewhere to build a community centre in part of his electoral district. It will be called the Willie Vasquez-Washington Memorial Outreach Centre. It will get him good coverage in the local press and secure votes from genuinely grateful families. But also:

• Willie will get himself appointed executive director at an annual salary of $49,500 plus medical benefits and free car
• the company of a good friend of his will secure the $200,000 dry-walling contract
• the company run by the husband of his campaign manager will get the contract to supply 24-hour security guards
• and Willie’s deadbeat brother just happens to own a rundown grocery store in part of the buildings which will need to be demolished to make way for the centre and which will be bought by the developers for 5 or 6 times its actual value

Thus Hiaasen builds up a detailed and persuasive picture of the graft, corruption and pork barrel politicking which surround every property development in Florida and whose ongoing net result is the devastation of the natural environment.

Nils Fishback

Meanwhile, there are some people living on Toad Island, 207 in all. They are sort of led by Nils Fishback, himself a failed architect and developer, who lost a lot of money buying up Toad Island real estate the last time someone promised to develop it 8 or so years ago. When that project went bankrupt, Fishback was stuck with numerous lots of unwanted land and adopted a man-of-the-people environmentalist pose, barefoot, brown as a nut and bandanna-ed.

It is Fishback who constitutes himself unofficial mayor of the island’s thin population and leads a half-hearted environmental opposition to the development. But of course he, like everyone else, has his price. Fishback demands from Clapley $510,000 based on an inflated valuation of the bum lots he bought years ago and in exchange he’ll use his influence to make sure the other inhabitants of the island acquiesce in the development (p.56).

See how it works? Pork for everyone. Everyone taking a cut, everyone spending all their time considering all the angles and how to maximise their revenue.

Palmer Stoat

And sitting at the centre of this complex web of financial and political matrices is a man named Palmer Stoat for Stoat is one of the two or three most important, influential and rich political fixers in the state of Florida (p.6) or, as Hiaasen puts it, in ‘the swamp of teeming greed known as Florida’ (p.380).

In this swamp, Stoat is a ‘big time lobbyist’, ‘adept at smoothing over problems among self-important shitheads’ (p.380).

It is Stoat who holds series of unofficial meetings with the governor, with Clapley, with Willie Vasquez-Washington, on golf courses or in strip clubs, and conveys the terms and conditions of the various deals which are required, the pay-offs, the back-handers, advises how to manage the press, the politicians, guides all parties through the paths of corruption, and so on.

More than any of Hiaasen’s previous novels, this one goes deep into the actual mechanics of back-handers, with detailed lists of how other elements in the governor’s budget sound and look good but are, in every case, designed to benefit party donors or members of the families of key players in local politics and business. Nothing is innocent. Nothing is pure.

And this obsessive centrality of money poisons not only politics and business but every aspect of human psychology and relations. The novel goes to great lengths to show how almost all personal relationships and almost every single conversation is based on The Deal. Even marriage, long, long ago in America, became a deal, between a woman wanting money and security and a man wanting a trophy wife, a bimbo on his arm to attend all those important social functions. Even casual relationships between men and women are shown to be full of calculation. When we hear about Twilly’s former relationships or Desie Stoat former partners, they are all couched in the language of The Deal: in this relationship he got this and she got that, then they discovered the deal wasn’t working out so they went to lawyers to annul the contract.

Lawyers infest American civic life partly because people regard other people instrumentally, as means to an end, like the pair of lowlifes in the previous novel, Lucky You, who spent 450 pages continually assessing whether it was worth carrying on being partnered with the other one or whether, what the hell, it was more cost effective just to shoot their partner and have done with it. There is no remnant of what used, laughably, to be called ‘humanity’ in any of them.

In novels (and movies) like this it feels like Americans have long, long ago lost the ability to think of other Americans as people. Everyone is a connection to be exploited, a partner to be used, until a better contact, job opportunity or ‘mark’ to be conned comes along.

The trigger

So that’s the setup, that’s the background. Factually dense and complicated, isn’t it, like most Hiaasen novels. You can tell he was a journalist because a) he has an awesome insight into the precise mechanisms of corruption in all these different spheres and b) he conveys it with tremendous brevity and precision. And you can tell he’s American because it’s all done in zippy, slangy, swearword-ridden prose.

You want to know about the actual plot? OK, well, it starts casually enough. Into this complex nexus of relationships comes Twilly Spree. Twilly is an unemployed 26-year-old college dropout who’s inherited enough money not to have to work and has long-standing anger management issues, not least regarding littering and despoiling the environment (anger issues which derive from his own father’s job as a property developer, systematically spoiling the coastline of Florida with property developments, pp.31 to 34).

This is why when Twilly’s driving behind a swish Land Rover and observes a load of MacDonalds wrappers being chucked out of its window, he sees red and tails the Rover back to an impressive luxury home, the home of none other than… Palmer Stoat.

Twilly watches from outside while Stoat gets changed and his wife – the stunningly good-looking 32-and-a-half-year-old Desie (p.327) – dress up for a meal at an Italian restaurant. They drive there in the wife’s convertible BMW, tailed at a distance by Twilly. Once they’re safely inside Twilly approaches the crew of a garbage truck working nearby and asks if he can borrow it for an hour for $3,000. They instantly agree and go off to a topless dancing joint (to chat up an ‘exotic dancer’ named Tia) while Twilly drives the truck to the posh Italian restaurant and dumps the garbage truck’s entire contents over Desie’s BMW, leaving it buried under several tonnes of stinking waste.

This is just the beginning, the opening salvo in the long farrago of farcical mayhem and comic complications which unravel across the next 500 pages (Sick Puppy is Hiaasen’s longest novel).

Plot highlights

Turns out Stoat has a big black friendly labrador he names Boodle (apparently American slang for ‘bribe’). Twilly breaks into Stoat’s house and kidnaps the dog. When he discovers Boodle is on medication, he goes back to burglarise Stoat’s house the following night (waiting till Stoat’s driven off accompanied by a woman) but finds Mrs Stoat waiting for him with a gun (the woman in the car was the maid).

After a moment or two of tension Twilly easily takes the gun off Desie and then, to his amazement, Desie announces that she wants to go with him, insists on going with him (to the motel where’s he’s keeping the happy doggy), and they slowly, over the next hundred pages or so they become an item.

(Many of Hiaasen’s central love affairs start this way, with one or other partner kidnapping the other or holding them up or generally breaking the law, in the same way that, after a while, I realised a lot of them feature one or more kidnapping.)

At this point Twilly simply wants Stoat to stop being a litterbug and chucking rubbish out his car. It’s only when Desie moves in with him that Twilly discovers the much bigger story about Stoat’s role in the upcoming devastation of a pretty, unspoilt island up on the coast. At that point Twilly broadens his horizons into blackmailing Stoat to use his connections to cancel the project: the blackmail is, cancel the project or I kill your dog.

Such is Stoat’s attachment to his big labrador that he sets out to do just that, leading to a raft of complications. Robert Clapley really doesn’t like the news of the cancellation, which is why he comes round with Mr Gash who ties up Stoat in his own house and inserts a live rat in his mouth. After a few uncomfortable moments Gash lets Stoat and he is at pains to clarify to Clapley that the project isn’t cancelled, merely delayed till his dog is returned, then it will all be revived again.

It explains why Clapley, once he understands that a dognapping is behind the complications, commissions Mr Gash to track down and kill the dognapper. This quest takes Mr Gash some time. In its early phase it leads him to the suspended workings on Toad Island where Gash encounters a very drunk Dr Brinkman. Drunk enough to think he can take out the stranger with a gun but when he takes a swing at Gash with a storm lantern, Gash calmly shoots him dead.

Shootout on the beach

And it’s here, on the island, several hundred pages of complicated discussions, meetings, and plot twists later, that there takes place probably the climactic scene. For it is here that Mr Gash finally discovers Twilly and Desie who’ve driven up to it in a big ranch wagon, with the dog (who Twilly, incidentally, early on insisted on renaming ‘McGuinn’). Mr Gash shoots Twilly who falls to the sand (the wagon is parked on the island’s beach) then forces Desie to strip at gunpoint and tries to rape her. His rape attempt is interrupted when the big labrador throws himself on Mr Gash’s naked back and calmly takes his neck in his teeth which leads to a bizarre, macabre and comical tableau.

The return of Skink

Anyway, all this is to ignore what might, to many Hiaasen fans, be the most significant thing about the book which is The Return of Skink! For the current governor, Dick Artemus, decides he needs the help of the legendary former governor of Florida, one of its most famous (fictional) sons, Clinton Tyree, who quit politics back in the 1980s to become a back-to-nature eco-vigilante. True to the basic principle that all human interactions in the book are exploitative, Artemus blackmails Skink into using his special skills to track down the damn dognapper and get the Toad Island project back on track.

Just to recap a bit: In order to explain why the project needs to be suspended, Stoat has had to tell both Clapley and the governor that his dog has been kidnapped and given as many details as he can about the kid who’s done it, and who he’s glimpsed a couple of times.

As mentioned, Clapley’s response is to commission Mr Gash to find and kill Twilly, but the governor’s is to blackmail Skink into coming out of the backwoods, find Twilly and bring him to the law.

Skink’s brother

But how does Artemus blackmail Skink? Well, for the first time in the series we are told that Skink has a brother; for while Clinton Tyree was being a hero in Vietnam, his brother Doyle was also serving in Nam but had a drunk idea to go fishing one night in enemy-occupied territory, and the sergeant driving the jeep managed to crash it and was killed outright while Doyle was badly injured.

Doyle was invalided out of the army but then had a nervous breakdown because of the guilt (pp.258 to 260). When he became governor, Clint used his position to swing a sinecure for his brother, to get him a job as ‘keeper’ of a fully automated lighthouse where he could hide himself away. (See? Everyone, absolutely everyone, even idealist Skink, uses their position and power to benefit themselves or friends and family. That’s what power is for in America.)

How does governor Artemus find the legendarily elusive Skink? He summons Jim Tile, the black state trooper everyone knows is Skink’s friend, and gets him to deliver a letter explaining to Skink that he has to find Twilly before the bad guys, or the current governor will expel Doyle from his safe lighthouse crib.

(Governor Artemus discovered the story of Skink and Doyle thanks to the diligent researches of his super-efficient personal assistant, Lisa June Peterson, the only one of his PAs who he doesn’t try to screw because she’s so damn good at her job and who, despite having given away the secret of Doyle’s existence, is in fact a keen fan of Skink. When Skink finally arrives at the governor’s mansion, Lisa June gets on well with Skink and, after a few conversations tells him she’s planning to write his biography. Hmm. I wonder whether she’ll become a recurring character.)

Anyway, this explains why, in parallel to Mr Gash’s attempts to track down Twilly, Desie and McGuinn, Skink is carrying out his own researches and how the two plotlines lead up to the climactic scene on the beach on Toad Island.

As you recall, Mr Gash follows the station wagon, sneaks up on it and when Twilly makes a move on him, shoots him, then tries to rape Desie, then has to fight off the bloody labrador which has jumped on his back because he thinks it’s all a boisterous game.

At which point Skink walks out of the undergrowth and interrupts proceedings, himself toting a gun. When Mr Gash goes to draw on him, Skink shoots his kneecap off and then fires another bullet through Mr Gash’s cheek, severing his tongue. While Desie is putting her clothes back on, Skink carries Mr Gash to the half-begun construction site, fires up an earth mover, and drives it forward till its caterpillar tracks have rolled over Mr Gash’s bottom half, pinning him in the mud. Mr Gash is still alive, though, and able to scream tongueless abuse while Skink turns and walks away, leaving him to die.

(In one last, gruesome touch, Mr Gash has just enough energy to get his cell phone out of his pocket and calls 911, only to be unable to communicate his situation because his tongue has been shot away. But his call will be recorded, just like the calls of all the other dying people he used to so enjoy listening to.)

Rhino horn and a wildlife park

There’s more, though, quite a lot more. Hiaasen has given Stoat a number of florid hobbies or interests. The simplest one is a taste for fine cigars, so that the novel repeatedly finds him in an expensive cigar store-cum-bar, puffing on a $300 dollar Havana. (There’s also a running gag that Stoat keeps quoting classic rock song titles but getting them slightly wrong, for example telling his wife he’s had ‘a tough day’s night,’ quoting that old Beach Boys’s song, ‘Wouldn’t it be great’, and so on.)

Much more lurid is Stoat’s hobby of shooting African wildlife at a semi-legal private zoo, the Wilderness Veldt Plantation. The grotesque comedy derives from the way most of the animals in this so-called safari park are at the bitter end of their lives and can barely stand up, let alone bound anywhere. In fact the novel actually opens with the scene of Stoat at the Plantation and shooting a rhinoceros which is so knackered it is utterly stationary.

Stoat wants the rhino’s head professionally stuffed so it can join all the other stuffed animal heads on the wall of his snug. (In a scene near the start of the book, Twilly sneaks into Stoat’s empty house and prises the glass eyes out of all the stuffed heads hanging on the wall of his snug and arranges them in a pentangle on his desk, in order to freak him out.)

But Stoat discovers from the sleazeball, Durgess, who runs the Plantation and organises these corporate ‘shoots’, that rhino’s horn is extremely valuable because of its supposed aphrodisiac qualities. To be precise, its abilities to give men rock-hard erections.

So Stoat sends away for the dead rhino’s horn to be converted to powder. The idea is that you sprinkle the horn powder into your drink on the evening you plan a big sex session. Thus Stoat becomes ever-more excited at the prospect of giving himself impressive erections with which to impale the florid array of mistresses and call girls he is routinely unfaithful to his wife with. (This helps explain why, faced with an idealistic and obviously nice young man in her kitchen, Desie on impulse decides she wants to run away from lying, thieving, cheating scumbag Stoat.)

When Clapley is livid that the Toad Island project is being put on hold till Stoat can pay off the dognapper and get his damn dog back, Stoat tries to appease him by offering him some of the recently arrived rhino horn powder. It helps appease Clapley and forestalls any further insertions of live rats into Stoat’s mouth.

But foolishly, instead of taking a light dusting of it in his drink, as he’s supposed to, Clapley gives the horn dust to the Barbie girls, who snort it like coke and go bananas, leading to a 24-hour orgy which trashes his bedroom. Next thing he knows, Clapley is on the phone to Stoat saying the girls refuse to have sex with him unless he can supply more magic rhino dust. Where can he get some more? Now?

So this pressure from Clapley forces Stoat to call up the wildlife guy, Durgess, and demand that he set up another big game shoot. We then follow Durgess as he and his ‘Supervisor of Game’, Asa Lando (p.337), scour the crappier wildlife parks of America and beyond in a bid to rustle up some half-decent ‘wild animals’. Like everything else in Hiaasen’s Florida, the Plantation is a scam, built on multiple other scams.

Eventually Durgess and Lando manage to buy an ancient and decrepit rhino which can barely stand, and have it flown to their park in readiness for a visit by Stoat and Clapley. Stoat has decided to make the event into a Big Day Out and bring together all the interested parties in the Toad Island ‘development’. So he’s invited along governor Dick Artemus and the corrupt vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Willie Vasquez-Washington – and this will provide the farcically violent climax of the novel.

(In a telling detail, Hiaasen tells us the land on which the park is now sited used to be owned by genuine citrus farmers, who sold it to the Plantation which is, in fact, co-owned by a Tokyo-based fish cartel and a Miami swimsuit designer named Minton Tweeze [p.446]. It is yet another example of the way some kind of ancient agricultural authenticity has given way to the modern corporate world characterised by a) international finance and b) shallow lifestyle emptiness. The Plantation pretends to recreate big game Africa while in fact being an abandoned citrus plantation on which its crooked owners tie down decrepit zoo-bred animals so they can be shot at by overpaid executives and drug dealers who take seven shots to hit an inanimate animal tied to a stake twenty yards in front of them. It is beyond pitiful.)

So as the novel approaches its climax, Stoat and Clapley and the governor and Willie stay up late the  night before ‘the hunt’ in the Plantation’s hunting lodge, getting drunk and telling ‘pussy stories’.

But unbeknown to them, Skink and Twilly have tailed them. Oops. This won’t end well. That night, at the other end of the park, Skink and Twilly break in through the plantation’s barbed wire fence, bringing with them binoculars, guns and camouflage outfits. They’re here to try and sabotage the Toad Island deal although, as they smoke a joint round a small campfire and roast roadkill (Skink’s habitual diet), neither of them knows exactly how.

The big game shoot fiasco

In the event, the farcical climax works out like this: next day dawns and the hunting party of Stoat and Clapley and governor Dick Artemus and Willie Vasquez-Washington head out, led by Durgess, accompanied by Asa, and with two of governor Dick’s bodyguards in tow towards the pitifully decrepit old rhino, which Durgess and Asa have carefully tied down to metal stakes to render as utterly undangerous as possible. Of course they are all armed to the teeth with all kinds of heavy duty rifles, and are watched through binoculars by Skink and Twilly, hiding at a distance.

What nobody expects to happen is that, when the wind blows the scent of the rhino towards Skink and Twilly’s hiding place, it over-excites the big, friendly labrador, Boodle/MacGuinn, who breaks free from his lead and goes running down the hill towards the fantastic smells emitted by the necrotic rhinoceros, which it bounds and leaps around.

At first the rhino ignores the barking labrador, right up till the moment MacGuinn bites the rhino’s tail. At that point it lumbers to its feet and sets off in a charge towards the most open piece of terrain – which is precisely where the four hunters, 2 bodyguards and two guides are standing.

In its first pass, while the other six men run away, Stoat and Clapley line up either side of the rhino’s path and, as it goes to run between them, they both fire simultaneously: Stoat manages to miss the rhino at point blank range, but Clapley’s bullet hits and smashes Stoat’s rifle, whose wooden butt explodes, mashing up most of the shoulder it was resting against (p.470). But that’s only part one.

For the enraged rhino then returns and spears Clapley on the horn he so wants, and then crushes Stoat to death. It is a scene of mayhem and catastrophe. Once the rhino has vacated the scene, Skink calmly strolls down from his hiding place in the nearby hill and reclaims MacGuin.

Tying up loose ends

And that is the gruesome and farcical climax of the novel. In the last 15 or so pages various loose ends are tied up:

Skink visits his brother holed up in the lighthouse. Doyle really is a basket case and can’t bring himself to open the door despite Skink banging on it and begging. All Skink wants to tell him is his position there is assured for all time. Skink now has enough on governor Artemus to end his career. (Threat, exploitation, power.)

Stoat is buried and we are shown the very mixed feelings of Desie who feels guilty about in some way triggering the sequence of events which led to his death.

To keep him quiet about what he’s seen (and photographed) Governor Artemus accepts Vasquez-Washington’s demand for the funds and so a new high school is built and named in his Willie’s honour.

Clapley’s two girls had already abandoned him when he couldn’t supply any more rhino powder and are now making careers in porn movies.

The novel ends with Twilly giving Skink a lift across the state back towards the outback, before intending to head back home, a chastened young man. But on the way they find themselves behind a car containing a foursome of young drunk litter louts chucking beer bottles and lit cigarettes out the window, and Skink looks at Twilly and Twilly looks at Skink, and they decide to take these young people need a lesson in environmental awareness! I.e. Skink emerges triumphant.

Dog’s eye view

In all this summary I haven’t found space to mention that a lot of the book is devoted to seeing events through the dog’s eyes. We don’t get doggy stream of consciousness, but the dog’s perceptions and ‘thought processes’ are described in detail at countless points throughout the story. Admittedly, these amount to about three ideas: going for a walk, fascinating smells, and food, but Hiaasen conveys very effectively the fun of owning a big, bounding healthy dog. Rather like the love of fishing which resonates through his novels, the reader assumes the vividness of the descriptions of McGuinn’s tail-wagging energy and liveliness reflect Hiaasen’s own interests and sympathies. The doggy passages go a long way to redeeming the sex mania and addiction and greed and corruption which characterise almost all of the human characters.

One-line summary

Possibly, I’m not quite sure – it would be fun to argue its merits vis-a-vis all the others in the series – but possibly this is the best Carl Hiaasen novel up to this point. It certainly feels like the most complex, combining gruesome violence with really in-depth analysis of American corruption, along with moments of real feeling, like Desie’s complex emotions at wanting to leave her scumbag husband and the genuinely moving scene where Skink reassures his profoundly disturbed brother that he’s going to be alright, and the recurring descriptions of the labrador’s boundless doggy enthusiasm and excitement.

It’s an astonishing achievement to combine so many different affects, from journalistic insight, to outrageous gruesomeness, to genuinely touching moments, along with hundreds of cynically hilarious scenes and plot developments, all in the covers of one novel. It’s like eating a box of fireworks.

Jaded sayings

‘Tract homes and shopping malls and trailer parks as far as the eye can see. More people, more homes, more roads, more houses. More, more, more, more, more, more, more…’ (p.414)

‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of real estate commissions.’ (p.442)

Credit

Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaasen was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999. All references are to the 2001 Pan paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

1. Tourist Season (1986)
2. Double Whammy (1987)
3. Skin Tight (1989)
4. Native Tongue (1991)
5. Strip Tease (1993)
6. Stormy Weather (1995)
7. Lucky You (1997)
8. Sick Puppy (2000)
9. Basket Case (2002)
10. Skinny Dip (2004)
11. Nature Girl (2006)
12. Star Island (2010)
13. Bad Monkey (2013)
14. Razor Girl (2016)
15. Squeeze Me (2020)