Something Witty That Would Work The Name Hiaasen In Here

I think that A Simple Plan is Sam Raimi's best movie. Mind you, it's not my favorite, that would be Evil Dead 2. But A Simple Plan is definitely one of his more restrained movies, and it starts off simply enough. Two everyman brothers find a plane crashed in some woods somewhere, and then find a bag of money inside. Deciding that that money would be pretty rad to have, they take it home. It's at this point that Raimi looks at the actors, stares at them for a bit, and just whispers "Go." What follows is a cascading snowball of crap as the primary players consistently make choices on what to do with the money, each one logically following from the last until the situation is entirely unrecognizable from the beginning, but you know how the characters got there.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that A Simple Plan is a script writer's wet dream and an excellent fucking movie, but that's also not entirely the point of this post.

I told you the first bit so I could say this with the proper context. I've recently polished off a couple of Carl Hiaasen's books, Skinny Dip and Star Island. Both of them take A Simple Plan's conceit (start with off with some clearly defined characters, throw them into an out of the ordinary situation, say "Go.") The difference being that some of Hiaasen's characters are somewhat larger than life.

For example, take Skink. Now, Skink wasn't always called Sknink, but he was always one not to be corrupted. Unfortunately, Florida is (apparently) an incredibly corrupt place. This drove then governor Skink to abdicate  his post in an incredibly showy way and go and become a hobo with one in the Everglades. He surfaces every now and then to punish corruption and help good people.

Despite this, each of his books follow a fairly logical chain of events. So you get to see each of the choices that the characters have to make, and you understand why they'd choose that (despite said choice normally being the wrong one), and you get the delicious consequences of said choices. And because Hiaasen's got an incredibly dark sense of humor, murther or other dismemberment is often used as the punchline to a joke. Plus he takes an incredibly anti-Corporation, anti-politicican, and pro-enviornmental view. He's pretty clearly a satirical writer, but he tells some incredible yarns.

Plus they're quick reads. I approve.