Fever Beach

Reviews

"Hiaasen is working in a grand tradition that stretches back to Mikhail Bulgakov satirizing Stalinism and Charlie Chaplin mocking Hitler. At his best, he can pack a paragraph with so many little parodic bangs that it feels like a fireworks display when the explosions come so fast you stop saying “Ahhh” and just stand in slack-jawed bedazzlement…. While white-shoe lawyers, university presidents and media moguls cower before the MAGA assaults on American democracy and decency, this mischievous 72-year-old writer is fighting back with every political gag and sex joke he can get his hands on.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Nearly 40 years and 20-plus books later, what was happening to Florida is now happening to the entire country. The United States is being despoiled, corrupted, perverted, bulldozed into a playground for the wealthy. The archetype Hiaasen helped invent, the Florida Man, was once just an overconfident moron who, say, drowned while wrestling a gator for his beer. Now America is run by Florida Men. No satirist arrived at our dystopian moment better prepared than Carl Hiaasen. The bad guys in Hiaasen’s books have always been dangerous and mockable. These days they’re more dangerous than ever, and an infuriated Hiaasen mocks them just as viciously as they deserve —punishes them in ways that, thus far, the real world has been unable to do. At age 72, unexpectedly more relevant than he’s ever been, Carl Hiaasen is on a hot streak that rivals his early career. Fever Beach is among Hiaasen’s best novels, because it faces the horrors of our stupid times and portrays them in all their grotesquerie. . . . Forty years ago, Carl Hiaasen started writing novels because he was upset about what he saw happening to his own little corner of the world. These days, he might be the only writer mean enough, and funny enough, to chronicle what’s happening to us all." —Dan Kois, Slate

"Remember Twilly Spree? The independently wealthy sometime ecowarrior who appeared in Hiaasen’s Sick Puppy (2000), and Scat (2009)? He’s in this new book, too, which is one of many things the novel has going for it. It also has Dale Figgo, a right-wing nutcase who was too crazy for the Proud Boys; Viva Morales, who’s renting a room from Dale, and whose bosses, a pair of alleged philanthropists, are almost certainly up to no good; an ambitious and deeply corrupt congressman; Dale’s mom, who isn’t thrilled about what her son is doing with his life; and a bunch of other delightfully weird characters. There is a serious story to be told about right-wing conspiracists, corrupt politicians, and shady philanthropists, and Hiaasen is sort of telling that story, but mostly he’s making us laugh—and not polite little giggles, either. We’re talking giant belly laughs, embarrass-yourself-in-public spleen-busters. This could be his funniest book yet." —Booklist Expand reviews