Because Sandie Herron read that I was swamped this week, she sent me two reviews that I can post. I’m always grateful when she has my back. So, I’m running one of those reviews today, and one on Friday. Thursday, of course, is “What Are You Reading?”. So, thank you, Sandie!

TRIGGERFISH TWIST

By Tim Dorsey

William Morrow

May, 2002

I am amazed.  Simply gob-smacked at how well Tim Dorsey can spin a wild tale and make it all come together.  It’s sort of like Thanksgiving dinner – when you take a zillion ingredients that cook at different temperatures and for different periods of time and have to make them all end up together at just the right moment.  It’s a skill that Tim Dorsey has found with words. 

It’s also one of the ultimate family rituals that protagonist Serge A. Storms is trying to protect.  He believes in the value of family and the ultimate neighborhood populated by people who actually know each other.  His hero is now Jim Davenport, family man.

Jim Davenport and his family have just moved south from Indiana to Tampa, Florida.  I know Tampa, since I live an hour south of it (isn’t it funny how we Floridians explain distance in time to drive?).  Anyway, Davenport is a consultant whose firm is expanding.  Jim has read an article on how terrific Tampa is, so he loads up the family and moves sight unseen onto Triggerfish Lane. 

Almost immediately one of his new neighbors, a descendent of a Florida developer, comes to fill him in on the neighborhood, which is populated by quite a variety of folk.  Across the street is Little League Coach Jack Terrier who has a fetish about keeping his St. Augustine grass perfectly manicured.  Down the way is “the rental” full of college kids who could care less what their lawn looks like while they’re inventing new ways to get high.  There’s the sculptor who’s lawn is full of ornamental junk.  Then there’s eccentric Ambrose Tarrington, III,  who still enjoys the high life whenever he can borrow a car or check out the mansions for sale.

John Milton enters the story when he is fired from his position as substitute teacher and he takes up his new place as bank teller at one of Tampa’s premier institutions in the domed building downtown.  John is content to help regular customers like the “E-Team”, a group of elderly ladies whose names all begin with “E” and who spend quite a bit of time in a Buick Regal.  When some new VP gets the hair-brained idea to move all the employees around to new positions, John hangs in there.  Until this new consulting firm in the person of Jim Davenport comes to determine what’s gone wrong at the Bank. 

Fans of FLORIDA ROADKILL and HAMMERHEAD RANCH will be excited to know that TWIST is actually a prequel featuring the introduction of Serge A. Storms and his sidekick Coleman.  Serge is a wildly intelligent man who just happens to have wild mood swings.  If he takes his medication, he does very well, but he doesn’t like how it dopes him up.  When he doesn’t take his medication, he just ends up stomping on people … literally.  Remember that house on Triggerfish Lane with the sculpture out front?  It’s for rent now, and Coleman and Serge move in after their previous home mysteriously burns down. 

If I were trying to pull this together, which I certainly could not do as well as Tim Dorsey has, I think I’d end up with a huge chart on the wall with lots of pushpins, just like Mahoney, from the Florda Department of Law Enforcement and former buddy of Serge.  Oh, I did mention that Serge was wanted, didn’t I?  And that Jim Davenport just happened to kill a man by mistake?  A terrible accident. However, the victim’s brothers get out of prison and are on their way to, you guessed it, Tampa. 

You know that saying: Truth is wilder than fiction?  I believe that Tim Dorsey has proven that postulate without one single doubt.  He has pulled together people from middle America to the outskirts of society with such flair (and yes, that is a pun) as to be genius.    Oh, I particularly loved Serge’s commencement speech.  Ala Ayn Rand, I must say.  I’ve no doubt Serge could go on for much longer than John Galt. 

Remember that Florida is the state where a few chads determined our last Presidential election.  Florida is the state where the “early bird” and the “snow bird” don’t fly and white sand replaces snow.  Tim Dorsey lives here.  He used to write for the Tampa Tribune.  He’s seen it, lived it, knows it, writes it.  This story is demented, frenetic, insane, incredible, zany, wild, whacky, and the best satire of the state I’ve ever had the treat to read.  The most incredible part of it all is that so many of the stories are true!  OK, in pieces.  Now those pieces have been interwoven in a tale full of intricacy and with finesse and full of nuance as well as some laugh-out-loud hysterically funny stuff.  How does Tim keep up the energy to get so many zingers on a page??

All of these events and subplots and people are somehow going to land on Triggerfish Lane.  When they do, there is going to be a rocking of the cosmos so overwhelming that Tampa, Florida, as we know it, will never be the same.