How dopey is the ultra right? ‘Fever Beach’ suggests ‘very’.

Hal Swerissen

Carl Hiaasen has been writing satirical crime fiction for 40 years. If you want eco-tourists, roadkill-eating former Florida governors, and killers with a whipper-snipper prosthetic arm, he’s your author. Bizarre greed, bad developers, and environmental destruction are his stock-in-trade.

Now Hiaasen has turned his attention to the absurdity of far-right elements like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers—the mad Trumpian maniacs who stormed the US Capitol building on January 6, just after Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election, complete with their horned bison helmets and coyote fur. They would be a kooky comedy skit if it weren’t for the fact that they killed and threatened people, including the then Vice President, Mike Pence. For everyone else in the world, it’s still a mystery that the chief insurrectionist has been re-elected as US President.

Hiaasen sets his novel Fever Beach in Florida with the usual cast of idiosyncratic characters. There is the dopey Dale Figgo, who has founded his own fringe-dwelling disgruntled insurrectionists, the Strokers for Liberty, complete with underhanded funding from an utterly self-obsessed billionaire couple mostly concerned with getting their names on as many buildings as possible. Too dim-witted for the Proud Boys, Figgo is set up by the local member of Congress, the corruptly incompetent Clure Boyette, to storm an aged care voting facility on the day of the midterm elections, with predictable results.

Unfortunately, the real world is unlikely to see Hiaasen’s fan-favourite eco-vigilante Twilly Spree come riding to rescue us from the loony right with his smart sidekick Viva Morales, but we can always hope.

This is a novel for those who want laugh-out-loud moments, like Himmler the savage militia dog eating a silicone “Dream Booty” sex torso, only to require bank-breaking emergency veterinary surgery for the inevitable bowel blockage that follows.

For Americans, the novel is probably a dispiriting social commentary. For Australians still insulated from the US madness—at least until the next election—it is an entertaining romp designed to infuriate rabid manosphere junkies and members of the hard right. It never quite reaches the heights of Hiaasen’s classic earlier crime satires, but it’s a nice diversion from the more depressing fringe populism increasingly making its way into the mainstream. Who would have thought the Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce duo would be serious contenders? Then again, Barnaby does like shouting at his dog Stella—hopefully, she won’t be eating sex toys anytime soon, but you never know.

While Trump’s America keeps generating headlines that look like bizarre plot points from satirical novels, we’re going to need people like Hiaasen to highlight the increasing absurdity of right-wing populism.