Chomp

As a native Floridian, Carl Hiaasen sets many of his novels in his home state, and Chomp is no exception. His website refers to Florida as a “bizarre place,” and that perception influences the creation of his characters and setting. For example, the protagonists of Chomp, Wahoo Cray and his father, Mickey, have quite unconventional jobs—Mickey wrangles wild animals (alligators, monkeys, snakes, exotic birds), renting them out for TV shows and commercials. While most people would maintain a healthy distance from an alligator, Mickey treats his own alligator, Alice, as part of the family, taking the view that if he is bitten, he is the one at fault, not the animal in question. For his part, Wahoo roams the family’s backyard zoo unsupervised, tending to the animals single-handedly after his father is injured by a frozen iguana that falls on his head. With this and other unusual details, Hiaasen establishes the surrealism of his world and his characters: a world that he knows firsthand from his initial career as a journalist. Having reported on the quirkiest aspects of Florida’s shadowy corners over the years, Hiaasen has gained plenty of raw material from which to craft his fiction.

As a result, many of Hiaasen’s adult novels fall into the genre of crime fiction. In fact, his first three novels—Powder Burn (1981), Trap Line (1982), and A Death in China (1984)—“borrowed heavily from [his] reporting experience” (“Biography.” Carl Hiaasen). Hiaasen has also published three collections of his newspaper columns “to prove he doesn’t just make up all the whacked-out scenarios in his novels” (“Biography”). Hiaasen’s work is often marked by the eccentric, the absurd, and the violent, and Chomp qualifies on all three counts.