Pluralistic: Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' (21 Oct 2025)


Today's links


The Penguin Random House cover for Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach.'

Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' (permalink)

Every Carl Hiaasen novel is a cause for celebration, but Fever Beach, his latest, makes it abundantly clear that this moment, this moment of Florida Man violent white nationalist grifting, is the moment that Hiaasen has been training for his whole life:

https://carlhiaasen.com/books/fever-beach/

Hiaasen is a crime novelist who got his start as a newspaper writer, writing columns about Florida's, ah, unique politics – and sublime, emperilled wilderness – for the Miami Herald. That beat, combined with enormous humor and literary talent, produced a writer who perfectly hybridizes Dave Barry's lovable absurdism with the hard-boiled pastoralism of the Travis McGee novels (Hiaasen wrote the introductions for a 1990s reissue of all of John D McDonald's McGee books).

Hiaasen's method is diabolical and hilarious: each volume introduces a bewildering cast of odd, crooked, charming, and/or loathsome Floridians drawn from his long experience chronicling the state and its misadventures. Every one of these people is engaged in some form of skulduggery, even the heroes, who are every bit as lawless and wild as their adversaries, though Hiaasen's protagonists are always smarter and more competent than his villains. The plots and schemes play out like an intricate clock that has been much-elaborated by a mad clockmaker with an affinity for eccentric gears, all set against the background of Florida, a glorious and beautiful place being fed into a woodchipper powered by unchecked greed and depravity.

After 20-some volumes in this vein (including Bad Monkey, lately adapted for Apple TV), something far weirder than anything Hiaasen ever dreamed up came to pass: Donald Trump, the most Florida Man ever, was elected president. If you asked an LLM to write a Hiaasen novel, you might get Trump: a hacky, unimaginative version of the wealthy, callous, scheming grifters of the Hiaasenverse. Back in 2020, Hiaasen wrote Trump into Squeeze Me, a tremendous and madcap addition to his canon:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#disappearing-act

Fever Beach is the first Hiaasen novel since Squeeze Me, and boy, does Hiaasen ever have MAGA's number.

The book revolves around a classic Hiaasen bumbler, Dale Figgo, an incompetent white nationalist who was kicked out of the Proud Boys after the Jan 6 insurrection, when he mistook a statue of a revered Confederate general for Ulysses S Grant (it was the beard) and released a video of himself smearing shit all over it. Cast out from the brotherhood of violent racists, Figgo founds his own white nationalist militia: the Strokers for Liberty, which differentiates itself from the Proud Boys by encouraging (rather than forbidding) frequent masturbation. Figgo takes his inspiration from his day-job, where he packs and ships disembodied torso sex-dolls for an adult e-commerce site, and he entices new Strokers by offering them free limbless fuck-dolls (stolen from work) as a signing bonus.

Figgo lives in a house bought for him by his long-suffering – and seriously boxing gym-addicted – mother, who despairs of his virulent racism. Her one source of comfort is Figgo's tenant, Viva Morales, a smart granting officer in the family office of the Minks (an ultra-wealthy Florida oligarch couple) who does not tolerate any of Figgo's bullshit and also pays her rent like clockwork.

Viva is the other fulcrum of the tale: her employers, the elderly couple behind the Mink Foundation, are secret white nationalist bankrollers who use their charity to funnel money to militia groups, including Strokers For Liberty. The conduit between the Minks and the Strokers is Congressman Clure Boyette, a MAGA Republican failson of an ultra-powerful Florida lobbyist, who (unbeknownst to his father) has raised $2m for the Strokers to finance a "Stop the Steal pollwatching" operation designed to terrorize voters who favor his opponent.

As a front for this dark money op, Boyette has founded the "Wee Hammers," a charity that pulls prepubescent children out of school and puts them to work with heavy power tools to construct houses in a child-labor-centric MAGA version of Habitat for Humanity. This goes about as well as you might expect.

Into this maelstrom, Viva Morales draws Twilly Spree, a recurring character first introduced in 2000's Sick Puppy as a successor to Skink, one of Hiaasen's best heroes. Twilly is a millionaire ecoterrorist who uses his family's obscene wealth – secured through investments in planet-raping extraction – to fund his arson, bombings, and general fuckery directed against Florida's most flagrant despoilers (it helps that Twilly has been psychologically gifted with the literal inability to feel fear). Twilly and Viva become a couple, and Twilly does what Twilly does – wreaking hilarious, violent and spectacular chaos upon the book's many characters.

There are so many characters – I've barely scratched the surface here. There's Galaxy, a dominatrix who loses patience with her long-term client, the MAGA Congressman Clure Boyette, after he stiffs her on a payment because he was too busy tweeting about an alleged plan by woke billiard manufacturers to replace the nation's black 8-balls with Pride-themed rainbow versions. There's Clure Boyette's soon-to-be-ex-wife, who must not, on any account, be shown the photos Galaxy took of Clure in a fur dog-collar and leash defecating on the floor of a luxury hotel suite. There's Jonas Onus, the number two man in the Strokers For Liberty, who terrorizes all and sundry by bringing them into contact with Himmler, his 120lb pitbull mix. There's Noel Kristianson, whom Dale Figgo runs over and nearly kills during an altercation over Figgo's practice of stuffing incoherent antisemitic rants into ziplock bags weighted with beach-sand and tossing them onto the driveways of unsuspecting Floridians. There's a constellation of minor characters and spear-carriers, including Key West drag queen martial artists and assorted discount-store Nazis, long-suffering charter bus drivers and a hit man who cannot abide racial prejudice.

The resulting story has more twists and turns than an invasive Burmese python, that apex predator of the gate-guarded McMansion development. It's screamingly funny, devilishly inventive, and deeply, profoundly satisfying. With Fever Beach, Hiaasen makes a compelling case for Florida as the perfect microcosm of the terrifying state of America, and an even more compelling case for his position as its supreme storyteller.

You do not need to have read any of Hiaasen's other novels to love this one. But I'm pretty sure that if you start with this one, you're going to want to dig into the dozens of other Hiaasen books, and you will not be disappointed if you do.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago WSJ tech writer damns DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20051027023456/http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20051020.html

#20yrsago Fundraiser: donate $500 to shut up loudmouth message-board poster https://www.metafilter.com/dios-rothkofundraiser.mefi

#20yrsago Chinese activist to Jerry Yang: You are helping to maintain an evil system https://web.archive.org/web/20051027021122/https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blogs/gelman/archives/003388.shtml/

#15yrsago Canadian gov’t scientists protest gag order, go straight to public with own website https://web.archive.org/web/20101020142208/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/federal-scientists-go-public-in-face-of-restrictive-media-rules/article1761624/

#15yrsago Scary Godmother: delightful, spooky graphic storybook for kids https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/20/scary-godmother-delightful-spooky-graphic-storybook-for-kids/

#10yrsago The Welcome to Night Vale novel dances a tightrope between weird humor and real pathos https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/20/the-welcome-to-night-vale-novel-dances-a-tightrope-between-weird-humor-and-real-pathos/

#10yrsago How a lobbyist/doctor couple are destroying Worker’s Comp across America https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-corporate-americas-plan-to-ditch-workers-comp

#10yrsago How the market for zero-day vulnerabilities works https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/the-rise-of-the-zero-day-market/

#10yrsago Reality check: we know nothing whatsoever about simulating human brains https://mathbabe.org/2015/10/20/guest-post-dirty-rant-about-the-human-brain-project/

#10yrsago On saying “no”: creativity, self-care, privilege, and knowing your limits https://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/120472862666

#5yrsago Solar's "miracle material" https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/20/the-cadillac-of-murdermobiles/#perovskite

#5yrsago Cadillac perfects the murdermobile https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/20/the-cadillac-of-murdermobiles/#caddy

#5yrsago Feds gouge states, subsidize corporations https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/20/the-cadillac-of-murdermobiles/#austerity

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.