“What is Florida anyway?” the columnist-turned-revolutionary Skip Wiley asks in Tourist Season, the first of Carl Hiaasen’s bestselling crime capers set in the Sunshine State. “An immense sunny toilet where millions of tourists flush their money and save the moment on Kodak film.” Skip Wiley is, ostensibly, the villain of Tourist Season, pitted against his former co-worker Brian Keyes, a good-looking ex-reporter who’s trying to make it in the PI business. After all, it’s Wiley who wants to scare every last tourist and retiree out of Florida—at least those he doesn’t personally feed to a 17-foot crocodile named Pavlov—and Keyes who tries to stop him.

Yet Skip Wiley is indisputably the star of Tourist Season. His manifestos make the front page of the paper; he’s always a step ahead of Keyes; his long speeches about Florida’s grimy history are delivered to us, uncut, by a columnist turned novelist who clearly agrees with every word he says, if not his propensity for homicide. Tourist Season was published in 1986, when Hiaasen himself had just moved from reporting at the Miami Herald to the columnist’s seat he would occupy for 35 years. “I knew I wanted to write something funny that still sort of cut to the ugly part of the bone marrow,” the novelist—whose new book Fever Beach is out May 13—has said. He couldn’t stand that, as a journalist, he could write about what was happening to his beloved Florida but he couldn’t do anything about it. “I don’t care how dispassionate you are as a reporter,” he said. “It’s hard not to get pissed off. The books were great therapy for that.”

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.

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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.

Raised in a suburb of Fort Lauderdale and educated at the University of Florida, Hiaasen started at the Miami Herald as a city reporter in 1976. By the mid-’80s, he had fallen in with the paper’s Sunday magazine Tropic, a legendary storehouse of oddball journalistic talent that birthed future Pulitzer winners Madeline Blais, Dave Barry, and Gene Weingarten. He’d co-written a couple of potboilers with the Herald’s Latin American correspondent William Montalbano, but it was with Tourist Season that Hiaasen found his niche: the poet laureate of Florida depravity.

Hiaasen’s Florida has its fair share of murders—asked to check his machine gun at the door by a bar bouncer, a guy protests, “But this is Miami”—and more than its fair share of corruption. (The typical Hiaasen civil servant has an account in the Caymans.) No beach is so beautiful that it can’t be sold for condos. No marshland is so ecologically sensitive that it can’t be drained for a golf course. No endangered species is so adorable that it can’t be extinguished, then made the namesake of the golf course’s restaurant.

You can read Skip Wiley, who once a year publishes his calculation of Miami’s “Asshole Quotient,” only to see it bowdlerized to “Idiot Quotient”—which gives him the chance for a yearly follow-up, declaring his editor yet another Miami asshole idiot—as Hiaasen’s cautionary tale to himself as he started his own column. A little bit of a hack, a little bit of a fabulist, Wiley has the ego of a journalistic star in an era when newspapers were money-printing machines. (For his part, though Hiaasen surely phoned it in now and then—what columnist doesn’t?—he had no trouble keeping the column fresh for three decades, perhaps because Florida never stopped offering him rich material.)

Wiley’s also been driven totally psychopathic by the degradation of Florida, and you sort of get the feeling that without the novels, Hiaasen might have been, too. In his next book, 1987’s Double Whammy, he funneled Wiley’s anti-development rage into his most beloved recurring character: Skink, né Clinton Tyree, a former governor of Florida who, despairing of his inability to cleanse the statehouse of corruption, disappears into the wilderness, becoming a roadkill-eating hermit and one-man Monkey Wrench Gang. Skink shows his tangled beard and perfect teeth every couple of novels, sabotaging bulldozers, scaring politicians, and generally making mischief. He represents Hiaasen’s acknowledgment that there’s a kind of valiant joy in being a thorn in the bad guys’ sides. “Justice is probably out of the question,” Skink says in one novel. “But we can damn sure ruin their day.”

Those first two novels introduced two Hiaasen staples, the clever hero with a dangerous streak and the antiestablishment trickster. The third, his first real masterpiece, Skin Tight, introduced the character type that set Hiaasen apart from everyone else writing detective stories at the time: the grotesque. Chemo is 6-foot-9, emaciated, with wispy hair and colorless lips. (One character observes he looks “like Fred Munster with bulimia.”) His face is so pockmarked he appears to be covered in Rice Krispies, the result of a tragic electrolysis error that was even more tragic for the dermatologist who made the mistake, whom Chemo garroted.

Chemo is a shocking character. His appearance is terrifying, befitting his employment as a heartless hit man. At one point Chemo loses a hand to a hungry barracuda; disdainful of the standard prostheses offered in the hospital, he instead pays a shady surgeon to attach to his stump a Weed Whacker. Hiaasen has so much fun with this freak, you can almost hear him cackling through the pages.

The comic energy of Hiaasen’s early novels peaked with Strip Tease in 1993. Though it was later adapted into a legendary flop of a movie starring Demi Moore, the novel is a marvel of tight plotting, low comedy, and outrage—this time at the subsidies that enrich the state’s sugar barons. It also introduces another in Hiaasen’s litany of terrors, the indelible Shad, a bouncer at the Eager Beaver, the low-rent strip club where the novel’s heroine Erin Grant plies her trade. Hulking, eyelashless, dead-eyed, Shad only interrupts his Camus to deal out pain to anyone who violates the club’s rules. As for Shad, he’s never felt much in the way of physical pain. “The doctors didn’t seem to know why.”

Shad’s not a villain, though; he’s more of a sidekick to Erin, who’s stripping to afford legal fees, because her reprehensible husband has convinced a judge that she’s an unfit mother to their child. The real monsters in Strip Tease are the horndog congressman who lusts after Erin, the sugar magnates who line his pockets, and the fixer who’ll do anything to make sure those payments continue. But joining Shad on Erin’s side is another recurring Hiaasen character, the Miami homicide detective Al García, a cigar-chewing wisecracker who’s one of the few Florida cops Hiaasen doesn’t portray as lazy, crooked, or both. Al’s a family man who’s crazy about his wife, whom he met when he locked up her first husband. In one scene he offers a dripping-wet Erin his coat and she thinks, How can you not like this guy?

Fever Beach is among Hiaasen’s best novels, because it faces the horrors of our stupid times and portrays them in all their grotesquerie.

But neither Al nor Erin are pushovers, and Strip Tease is a testament to Hiaasen’s skill with another kind of character, one that’s almost as unusual in the world of crime fiction. Hiaasen excels at writing nice characters who nonetheless aren’t saps. Working together, with Shad as a little extra muscle, Al and Erin extricate her from any number of scrapes and reunite her with her daughter. What happens to the congressman, the fixer, and Erin’s hateful, wheelchair-stealing ex-husband? I’d hate to spoil the fun by telling you about their richly deserved rewards.

After Strip Tease, Hiaasen settled into cruise control. Some of the mischief of his adult novels was siphoned into the very successful middle-grade books he started publishing in 2002, several of which featured Skink, a kind of rough-hewn superhero of the sort who makes for a great children’s book hero. At times in his writing for adults he seemed to struggle to find new ways to express what made Florida so outlandishly weird, even as his novels’ plotting got tighter and his dialogue approached Elmore Leonard levels of deadpan. Bad Monkey, a perfectly amiable 2013 thriller that uneasily shifted Hiaasen’s attention from Florida to the Bahamas, became the source material for a recent Apple TV+ series starring Vince Vaughn that people seem to enjoy. But I thought I could basically stop reading Carl Hiaasen—I thought he’d said all he had to say. And then America went to hell.

Hiaasen’s first Trump-era novel is dedicated “In memory of my brother Rob.” Rob Hiaasen, a lifelong journalist like his brother, was an editor and columnist at the Capital Gazette, a small newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland. He was in the newsroom on the day in 2018 that a man with a grudge against the paper walked in the front door with a shotgun and killed five employees. A couple of months later Carl Hiaasen bid his brother farewell in the Herald. “My brother wasn’t shot because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he wrote. “He was shot because he was exactly where he was supposed to be … He was shot because he was a journalist, and for no other reason. You can go online and find more than a few yammering fascists who think that’s perfectly OK here in the United States of America.”

Carl Hiaasen Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

Hiaasen seems to have poured all his sadness about the world into the piece. “Each of us struggles with overwhelming loss in our own way,” he wrote, “so I wrote a column, which, after an eternity in this business, is all I know how to do.” But Hiaasen also, it seems, poured his anger about the world into the novel he was working on, and the result was a scabrously funny, outrageously mean satire that read as if Hiaasen had decided never to pull a punch again.

Squeeze Me, published in 2020, opens with the disappearance of 72-year-old Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons, “of the asbestos and textile Fitzsimmonses,” from a white-tie gala in Palm Beach. Kiki is a member of the POTUS Pussies, “a group of Palm Beach women who proclaimed brassy loyalty to the new, crude-spoken commander-in-chief,” and it’s that president around whom the novel revolves. Hiaasen is determined, it seems, to meet the crudity of Donald Trump—referred to here by the Secret Service code name “Mastodon”—with straight-up cruelty, passing up no opportunity to humiliate the buffoon in extravagantly creative, disgusting ways.

The president, in Squeeze Me, is despised by his wife, who is paid $20,000 each time she holds his hand in a public setting. One character speculates that if the president and the first lady were ever to have sex, she’d have to be on top, to avoid suffocation, but that’s unlikely anyway as she’s cuckolding him with a Muslim Secret Service agent. Inside the president’s tanning bed, an assistant finds an extra-large adult diaper, burnt to a crisp.

If the president is another of Skip Wiley’s many Florida assholes, ripe for the mocking, the POTUS Pussies are even worse—exorbitantly wealthy and entitled (“of the bauxite and lanolin Wittlefields,” “of the personal-lubricant Fricks”), willing to assume the worst of everyone they meet except their beloved president. “Throughout the long deep-state witch hunt—the doctored Minsk defecation video, the phony tax-evasion probe, the counterfeit porn star diaries, the bogus Moscow skyscraper investigation, the hoax penile-enhancement scandal, the fake witness-tampering charges, and both fraudulent impeachment trials,” he writes, “the Potussies had remained steadfast, vociferous, adoring defenders.” Watching Hiaasen’s smart, funny heroes take down these horrid millionaires is an invigorating reading experience for anyone who, like me, has felt the need for a truly gonzo treatment of the current moment.

The primary antagonist of Fever Beach, Hiaasen’s new novel, is a two-bit white supremacist named Dale Figgo. Expelled from the Proud Boys for masturbating too much, Figgo forms his own hate group, Strokers for Liberty. He’s so stupid that he refuses to use his washer-dryer, “believing the machine was equipped with software that could read and report the seditious slogans on his tank tops.”

Unfettered access to the laundry room is the sole perquisite of being Figgo’s tenant, observes Viva Morales. Taken for her life savings by her despicable ex, stuck working for a corrupt right-wing foundation, Morales may be down on her luck, but her quick wit and checkered past immediately identify her as a Hiaasen heroine. When she encounters Twilly Spree—another recurring character in the Hiaasen universe, an angry rabble-rouser in the Skink mode—the adventure is set in motion.

Looming over all these characters, though, is Clure Boyette, a congressman from the panhandle who’s employing the Strokers for some dirty tricks—and who has his eyes on Viva. While the hapless congressman in Strip Tease was an amalgam of every horny slob who’s ever fumbled his way into a House seat, Clure Boyette could not more obviously be Matt Gaetz. “Every angle of his face was exaggerated, like a Dick Tracy villain,” Viva observes. Whatever product he used to sculpt his hair made it shine like roofing tar.” His gleaming white teeth are so prominent as to be equine; “Viva could almost picture feeding him a carrot through the rails of a corral.” Boyette also shares Gaetz’s (alleged!) weakness for younger women, as well as his generous Venmoing of them for their company.

Boyette may be a numbskull—“The inside of your brain is like a fucking bounce house,” his wealthy father observes—but he’s a true believer who sees threats around every corner: “the dismantling of the Constitution by leftist child molesters, the cyber-hijacking of laser satellites by Zionist astrophysicists, the transgender conspiracy to infiltrate women’s volleyball.” Viva is “surprised at the rabidity of Boyette’s views,” but we aren’t, as we see him glad-hand Dale Figgo and his cronies, plotting an Election Day surprise.

Hiaasen has always been a devilishly inventive dispenser of punishments to his chumps and villains. (Witness the race-car driver in an early novel who dies in a pit wreck, is cremated in his fireproof racing jacket, and then has to be cremated all over again.) But the agonies through which Hiaasen puts the many, many bad guys of Fever Beach boggle the mind. Boyette is blackmailed, belittled, tranquilized, poleaxed, and photographed wearing nothing but a furry dog collar. The millionaire Christian conservative who employs Viva cannot stop degrading himself with a polymer sex toy called the “Dream Booty.” And poor Dale Figgo—whew. He rides his bike into the side of a truck, skinning off his entire nose on the pavement. High on morphine as he’s rolled into the OR, Figgo spews antisemitic slurs within earshot of the all-Jewish operating team, with catastrophic results: “During a hushed consultation the physicians agreed that the patient’s scrotum would be an ideal location from which to harvest the skin for his nose. Such a procedure was unusual, though not without precedent.”

“Did they get the skin from, like, a turkey neck?” an ex-girlfriend asks, peering at Figgo’s new nose. Bear in mind that this richly deserved misfortune, getting his balls stuck on his face, happens to Dale Figgo on page 151. Hiaasen still has 200 pages left to torture him.

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As I watched Hiaasen pile indignity upon indignity upon these hideous monsters’ heads, I could not stop cackling, and was reminded of the writer Ian Frazier’s definition of the purest satire: “its preferred outcome would be for its object to fall down dead.” Between Fever Beach and Squeeze Me, Hiaasen has surveyed the entire right-wing ecosystem of Florida—and thus of America—and discovered that the new ruling class make for excellent additions to his roster of grotesques.

“I remember when I was working in the newsroom in Miami,” Hiaasen said in a 2017 interview, “we used to think we had a monopoly on the weirdness and depravity, but it goes all the way from the Panhandle to Key West now.” That’s typical Hiaasenian understatement; truly, the weirdness and depravity of Florida now stretch from sea to shining sea. 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.

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