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July 24
Hardback
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Hammerhead Ranch Motel
by Paul Bishop
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Reviewed by Anya R. Weber
"I have seen it with alarming frequency," Jethro
told Art. "It is a well-worn path: The Downward
Spiral into Paradise. They all follow the same
internal riff-raff gyroscope and drag their
traveling cavalcade of dumbness across the
Florida state line for a final stand that ends only
in crime tape and headlines...."
Florida gothic is a growing genre, with Miami
second only to LA as locale of choice for hard-
bitten drug-driven crime novels. Tim Dorsey, in
this sequel to Florida Roadkill, single-handedly
takes on the entire gator-noir genre, and proves
himself to be a manically funny writer with a
warped and overcrowded imagination.
Many writers have been seduced by the sultry
and tawdry Floridian landscape to craft sweaty
mysteries, featuring nubile heiresses to drug-cartel
fortunes and multiple speedboat chases through
python-heavy swamps. Dorsey takes an almost
smelly delight in lampooning these overboiled
clichÈs, while simultaneously showing off his
native's familiarity with the land, culture and
people in question. (How many other gator-noir
writers would dare to have their characters spout
off obscure Florida factoids during a shoot-out?)
Any attempt to describe the plot here would be
silly and futile. Hammerhead Ranch Motel
contains a dancing weather-dog, murder by
taxidermy, a gang of Hemingway impersonators,
little old ladies wielding firearms, bad '80s pop-
rock power-ballads, and more Florida trivia than
anyone, sane or insane, should be allowed to let
into their brain. The story revolves, tornado-
esque, around a suitcase full of $5 million in drug
money, and the various unsavory characters in
pursuit of this (and other kinds of) booty, before a
hurricane hits and blows everything even further
to hell.
The book's main flaw is a zaniness overdose,
often to be found in madcap satires of any kind.
Lots of stuff here is hilarious, and much is not.
Dorsey's funniness score is actually pretty high,
maybe 68% amusing to 32% not. His biggest
problems lie in two places.
First, every female in the book is a highly
sexualized bimbo-and, while many of the men
are as well, it feels wrong having no interesting
women in such a diverse parade of weirdos. More
detrimentally, Dorsey has trouble knowing quite
what to do with his protagonist, Serge A. Storms.
Accurately described on the book jacket as a
"hyperactive spree killer and fanatical Florida
folklorist," Serge is quite the creation: a
charismatic and ultra-unstable walking, talking
Ritalin ad. Demented psychos are a dime a dozen
in crime fiction, but even among their ranks
Serge is a doozy, with his encyclopedic knowledge
of everything Floridian and his obsessive-
compulsive need to photograph cheesy tourist
attractions along the state highway (even in the
middle of a car chase).
Unfortunately, he's also a sadistic killer, and a
couple of the deaths here are too gruesome to be
funny. Maybe I'm being oversensitive, but it
spoils my good time to hear
people screaming in
agony. Despite the hyper-unreal tone of the novel-everything is exaggerated and heightened for
comic effect-there's a line between gross-out
humor and plain morbid nastiness, and the novel
stumbles across it a couple of times.
Despite its flaws, though, any book that can bust
a reader out of summer lethargy into hysterical
laughter is okay by me. Hammerhead Ranch
Motel is a bumpy ride, but well worth the rough
bits for the moments where Dorsey soars to
glorious heights on the wings of his own
absurdity.
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