Post
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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