Florida man A novel

Thomas Cooper

Book - 2020

"Florida, circa 1980. Reed Crowe, the eponymous Florida Man, is a middle-aged beach bum, beleaguered and disenfranchised, living on ill-gotten gains deep in the jungly heart of Florida. When sinkholes start opening on Emerald Island, not only are Reed Crowe's seedy businesses--a moribund motel and shabby amusement park--endangered but so are his secrets. Crowe, amateur spelunker, begins uncovering artifacts that change his understanding of the island's history, as well as his understanding of his family's birthright as pioneering homesteaders. As this unfolds, Crowe has to contend with Hector 'Catface' Morales, a Cuban refugee, trained assassin, and crack-addicted Marielito, seeking revenge on Reed for stealing... his stash of drugs and leaving him for dead (unbeknownst to Reed) in the wreckage of a plane crash in the Everglades decades ago. Meanwhile, there are other Florida men with whom Crowe must contend ... There are curses. There are sea monsters. There are biblical storms. There's something called the Jupiter Effect. Ultimately, Florida Man is a generation-spanning story about how a man decides to live his life, and how despite staying landlocked and stubbornly in one place, the world nevertheless comes to him"--

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Subjects
Genres
Thrillers (Fiction)
Magic realist fiction
Suspense fiction
Published
New York : Random House [2020]
Language
English
Main Author
Thomas Cooper (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xxiv, 382 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 381-382).
ISBN
9780593133316
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

As a teen in the late 1960s, Reed Crowe witnessed a small plane crash near Emerald Island, Florida. He thought there were no survivors, and grabbed a bundle of marijuana floating in the water. Almost 20 years later, Crowe owns the roadside attraction Florida Man Mystery House, and the rundown Emerald Island Inn, and he was wrong, there was a survivor, and he is now hell-bent on revenge. As Cooper's (The Marauders, 2015) thoughtfully crafted, wildly overblown, fully engaging tale progresses, the gritty and graphic violence that comes from dirty deals and drug crimes is balanced with small details that connect all the story lines and portrayals of diverse characters who reveal imperfections that make them truly human. Cooper also addresses how Florida was settled and how tourism had come to define its culture. With a strong setting in time and place, dark humor, and tension between themes worthy of contemplation and hard-hitting action, Cooper's high-energy tale of mayhem will appeal to fans of Quentin Tarantino, Carl Hiaasen, or Tim Dorsey.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Beach bums, wack jobs, and refugees populate Cooper's Technicolor vision of 1980s Florida in this darkly entertaining tale (after The Marauders) set on fictional Emerald Island on the Gulf Coast. Reed Crowe has a secret, but no idea how dangerous it will prove. Two decades earlier, at 17, Reed and his soon-to-be wife, Heidi, witnessed a plane crash and found a shipment of marijuana in the burning wreckage. "This is going to change our life," Reed says. Now, proprietor of a cheesy tourist attraction called the Florida Man Mystery House and owner of the seedy Emerald Island Inn (acquired thanks to his sudden windfall from the drugs), Reed is middle-aged, often stoned or drunk, and melancholy. Reed and Heidi's marriage has unraveled, partly because of the murky circumstances around their daughter's death, and partly because he wanted to stay put, while she insisted on leaving for New York City to advance her art career. Wayne Wade, Crowe's degenerate, drug-peddling childhood friend and "de facto factotum," works at the motel, but not much, and runs his mouth at local watering hole the Rum Jungle, where Henry Yahchilane, a Seminole Vietnam vet, overhears something from Wayne about a human skull sighting on a Florida Man swamp tour. After a series of violent, misunderstood encounters, Crowe and Yahchilane team up against crack-addicted Cuban refugee and assassin Hector "Catface" Morales, who seeks revenge on Crowe for stealing his drugs years earlier. As Crowe manages to avoid death by snake, sinkhole, stabbing, explosion, Jet Ski, and heartbreak, he begins to know himself better, along with those around him. Throughout, Cooper's macabre and brutal universe crackles with energy and wit, and will hold readers' attention until the very end. Cooper's riotous, riveting tale rivals the best of Don Winslow. (July)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A beach bum who's a magnet for bad juju struggles to maintain his hard-knock life and idle pleasures amid the heat-seeking trouble headed his way. Gulf Coast native Cooper made a memorable debut with The Marauders (2015). This second act delivers an even messier, nastier, more brutal, and engaging yarn that spans decades on a remote outpost deep in the wilds of Florida. Most crime novels zero in on a single target: a murder, a heist, or just regular bloody revenge. In this fascinating decadeslong trek, we follow perpetually stoned Reed Crowe and his nearly endless run of bad luck. Our titular loser is stuck, both psychically and physically, on Emerald Island, one of those fabled tourist traps from the 1950s, where Reed, circa 1980, manages a run-down motel and a pathetic amusement park, The Florida Man Mystery House. There's an ex-wife, an internationally known artist named Heidi, as well as the memory of their dead little girl, Lily, which haunts him daily. As in many small towns, the denizens of Emerald Island live in a state of perpetual, tentative détente that threatens to erupt into violence at any moment. Among them are Wayne Wade, Reed's pervy, drug-addled buddy; a kid named Eddie Maldonado who insists on helping with Reed's various schemes; and most importantly, Henry Yahchilane, a quiet but dangerous loner who marks Reed as a threat to one of his most closely held secrets. Things get way out of hand when a villain named Hector "Catface" Morales, a Mariel boatlift veteran and sadistic assassin long thought dead, resurfaces with a plan to punish Reed for a dope deal gone wrong years ago. Add a few biblical hurricanes, the occasional sea monster, and Jimmy Buffet and stir. This cocktail's recipe would be one part Travis McGee, one part Carl Hiaasen, and a salt shaker full of magical realism. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Category One Grotto (1980) The Sinkhole It was a three-aspirin morning, the day after the anniversary of Reed Crowe's daughter's death, the eve of his ex-wife Heidi Karavas's return to the island after one of her long trips abroad, and something was amiss. So amiss that Crowe stopped stirring the sugar in his Café Bustelo and set down his spoon on the kitchen island and pondered what it was. His head, like a Magic 8 Ball these days. The pot, the wine. yes. no. maybe. try again later. Mostly the latter. Sometimes he wondered if he wasn't losing his mind, like his mother, living almost five years now in a Fort Lauderdale nursing home. Early onset dementia. Now Crowe looked through the Gulf-facing windows of his beach house, scratching his beach bum beard, blinking groggy blinks behind his green-tinted aviators. Yes, something was off. Something was peculiar. Crowe couldn't place what. A nervous tinselly light dappled the ceiling and glittered on the terrazzo floor. Brighter than usual, the sun. Sharper. He sipped from the blue enamel florida man mystery house mug, the coffee still so hot it scorched his lips. He cursed, set the mug down. Then he noticed the blank wall next to the television. Where a framed watercolor by Lily, his deceased daughter, usually hung, there was now a bare nail. Crowe got up from the kitchen island stool and went to where the painting lay facedown on the floor. He picked it up. The glass and frame were unbroken. A watercolor of Crowe, fishing, on a little dinghy in the sea. Below the boat Lily had drawn a coral reef with anemones and parti-colored polyps. A school of bright tropical fish swam toward Crowe's line and hook. The fish had exaggerated smiles, human teeth. Crowe put the painting back up, straightened it. "Otter," he said. The girl's nickname. He was not usually a superstitious man. But even with the painting back on the wall, Crowe sensed something off. He scratched the scruff of his beach bum beard, contemplated what it was. He put on his rubber flip-flops and scuffed outside in his boxers and bathrobe. A brilliant cloudless morning, mid-April, the south Florida sun in his hair and on his scalp. Almost tourist season. Almost spring break. Almost f***ed, between the Emerald Island Inn and the Florida Man Mystery House, his businesses, if you could even call them that, falling to ratshit. All of his debts piling on. But a beautiful day yet. The mellow spring breeze riffling the sea oats on the sand dunes. Crowe was halfway across his small garden, its menagerie of cacti and succulents in terra-cotta pots, when he halted. The lime tree with the red hummingbird feeder, vanished. For a wild second he thought the tree stolen. He wondered what kind of reprobate would go to such lengths. Before long he realized this an addle-brained notion. It was a sinkhole. A sinkhole. In his f***ing yard. The state was riddled with them. Honeycombed. And now here was one just like they showed on the news, on his property. florida man wakes up to hole halfway to china in his backyard Crowe toed up in his zories for a closer gander. Where it once stood there was now an unimpeded view of Florida beachfront. He could see the plank board path wending among the hundred-year-old dunes. And beyond the dunes the expanse of sugar-white beach, the bottle-green Gulf rolling soft and tranquil like it always did before spring heated up and summer storms made the water moody. Crowe stepped to the edge of the chasm and peered down. He couldn't see bottom. Couldn't see the hummingbird tree. Just an ink black crack, a zigzag seam of darkness. "Holy motherf***ing blue shit," Reed Crowe said. Arms akimbo, face vexed, Crowe glanced around. He went to the patio table and fetched the conch shell ashtray full of joint ends and chucked it into the hole. Down it clattered and clacked, maybe twenty-five feet, maybe thirty, before hitting bottom. He wanted to chuck other things down the hole, and he could have easily pissed away the whole morning in this fashion, but there was no time. It was ten a.m. and he was due at the Florida Man Mystery House. The Florida Man Mystery House The Florida Man Mystery House, one of those dubious roadside attractions in this part of the state, a remnant from the era of tin can tourism, before HoJo and Holiday Inn and oh-Jesus-Christ-Mary-Mother-of-God Disney World. Now the highway billboards for the Mystery House were so faded, the paint so thin, the paper so flayed and shredded, the palimpsest of old ads showed underneath. You had to wonder if the place was still open. It was. Barely. But in its heyday the Florida Man Mystery House boasted about a dozen big billboards all along the Florida highways. I-75, I-95, I-4. Two on Alligator Alley. Even a few on the newfangled turnpike. Now, these days, the Florida Man Mystery House was more of a place you happened upon by accident. A place you stopped to stretch your legs. A place where you stopped to take a piss, a dump. A place where you got out of your pea-green station wagon with the wooden siding because you couldn't stand another moment in the sweltering car with your batshit family. A picayune operation, the Florida Man Mystery House. A skeleton crew. Just Reed Crowe, Wayne Wade, and Eddie Maldonado, aka the Coca-Cola Kid, a Mexican teenager from outside Emerald City. Beginning of April, Eddie showed up asking if he could sell refreshments off Crowe's boat. The kid offered to pay for part of the gas, plus half the soda earnings, cash. Crowe saw no harm. Told the kid just the gas money was fine. If times weren't so lean, he might not have asked for that much. And now, this morning, in his orange hatchback en route to the Florida Man Mystery House, Crowe passed one of the billboards. He gave the shabby-looking advertisement a look of rue. The old-time tiki font faded and birdshit-spackled, the attractions almost illegible. go spelunking in the deepest [bird shit] of [bird shit]. outer space [bird shit]. amazing odd [bird shit]. coca-cola. tab. ice-cold [bird shit]. Riding shotgun was a head of lettuce, for Bogey the tortoise. "See that, man?" Crowe asked the lettuce. "Ice-cold bird shit. Now I'm jonesin' for ice-cold bird shit. How 'bout you?" bathrooms clean! long drive before another [bird shit] one! see bogey the 200-year-old tortoise! "F***in' Wayne," Crowe muttered. A refrain of late: f***in' Wayne. Wayne Wade, Crowe's childhood friend and factotum of Crowe's moribund enterprises. Wayne Wade with three DUIs. Wayne Wade, always in arrears with a bookie or a weed dealer. Wayne Wade, fired from every pool hall and sports bar and wing hut in the county. And eighty-sixed from over half of those. Places where even the pill heads and cokeheads kept their jobs. Lately Reed Crowe thought he needed a big long break from Wayne Wade. Several months at least. He hated feeling this way about his lifelong friend, but there you had it. Everywhere he turned, Jesus Christ: Wayne. Wayne at the pool hall. Wayne at the Sea Cave Arcade. Wayne at the Rum Jungle. Mostly it was at the Rum Jungle these days, because Wayne was eighty-sixed for life from Chill Norton's Pervy Mermaid on the other side of the bridge. There was also Reed Crowe's other business. The Emerald Island Inn. Two stories, a salt-crusted old Florida motel if there ever was one, stucco of turquoise and cream and pink, narrow cement balconies connecting the rooms. Towels and beach shorts and bikini bottoms hanging on the railing, Florida Gator and Florida Seminole kids crowding the public beach with their coolers full of beer and their cheap tourist shop beach chairs that broke four days after you bought them. More than half a century ago when they built the causeway from the mainland to Emerald Island, the inn was erected near the public beach, between the water tower and the lighthouse. There was the Rum Jungle tiki bar, the Blue Parrot diner, the bait shop, the mini-mart. These were the few concessions to tourism on the island. The rest of Emerald Island was divvied up into big multi-acre lots belonging to the locals. And beyond these big chunks of land, on the southern half of the island, was primordial wilderness, the nature preserve. One of the last bastions of undeveloped beachfront this part of Florida. Decades ago the island's big coral reefs were a popular destination for snorkelers and scuba divers, but in the late sixties a freighter carrying insect repellent and rat poison demolished the reef. One of the major tourist attractions, gone. Now the coral was dead bone, the hydra-headed gorgonians bleached white. Fewer and fewer came the snowbirds. The sportsmen and yachtsmen and anglers. The convalescents who sought the tropical climate, the sun and the salt air and the long walks on the beach, to restore their health. To some of the more misanthropic natives, this was just as well. With a passel of other itinerant part-time employees and a few part-time maids, Wayne Wade managed, if that was the word, the old Emerald Island Inn. A mistake ever to mix business and friendship. Excerpted from Florida Man: A Novel by Tom Cooper All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.