Sick Puppy

I suppose there is some funny side to reading a book that would work better as a movie. It’s like a slap in the face to those people, me admittedly, who say after they’ve seen the film, “the book is much better”. As there is no film in existence of Carl Hiaasen’s Sick Puppy, no real comparison between the mediums can be made but that doesn’t mean I won’t try when I tell you my thoughts on this book. 

Reading the blurb, this sounds like a fun and juicy crime thriller: a big shot lobbyist, Palmer Stoat, becomes the victim of a series of nasty pranks when psycho greenie, Twilly Spree, sees him littering from his car window. But harmless pranks of covering one of Stoat’s cars in garbage and then filling the other with dung beetles escalate into more serious territory when Spree discovers that Stoat is lobbying for the destruction of a coastal island to make a large golf resort. Kidnapping and dismemberment soon ensue, but things just go from bad to worse as Stoat enlists the help of his political ‘friends’ to bring Twilly down. 

At best, this book is a novelty. It’s a black comedy of a good strong vein; sometimes reading as a crime novel attempting to mimic Larsson and other times taking on a tone of omniscient disinterest in any of its characters, but there are a few crucial flaws that make it a tricky and sometimes dispiriting reading adventure. For a start, there are various points throughout the novel where Hiaasen completely loses his tense. Sometimes he’ll even change tenses midway through one sentence and that’s an instant yank out of the world that we as readers are trying to engulf ourselves in. Abrupt changes like that cause a book to become mere words on a page rather than a doorway into a new world. 

Then we have the characters. Admittedly there is a fun and frisky novelty in the idea that all these characters are just as sick and psychotic as each other in some way or other, I will say that I did enjoy that layer of the book. But there are so many characters that get roped into this misadventure and none of them really ever get any development, which resulted in my not being able to really feel for or become attached to any of them. 

Throughout the book, I never got a sense of these characters and that added to my struggles of trying to envelop myself in the book. It’s hard to enjoy being in a world where you don’t really know or like any of the inhabitants. 

But, the overall humour of the book is very funny, fresh, and frisky and the story of an ultimate ripple effect of inevitable doom is always intriguing. The Coen brothers could probably make a good film out this. The only problem is that there are barriers that stop the reader from becoming rapt up in Sick Puppy’s world and it proves to make a tough reading experience because it becomes so easy to put the book down and do something else. 

However, the fresh albeit sick characters and the various shenanigans they get up to within this book are worth the read if you like black comedies and crime novels. But if you like well-rounded and well-written books that invite and envelop you into their worlds then maybe give this one a miss.

Author: Carl Hiaasen

Published: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000