‘Chomp’ is a wild and wacky ride

By: 
Jan Jones

Carl Hiaasen is one of my favorite authors, so I was happy to find “Chomp” on Infosoup.

Mickey Cray, his wife, Sue, and son Wahoo own several rescued critters. To offset the cost, Mickey allows tourists to see the animals up close. Their stars are Alice, the 12-foot alligator, and Beulah, the massive python. A couple years ago, Alice accidently bit off Wahoo’s thumb, but he knows it was his fault, too.

Occasionally the animals are used in TV or movie productions. Money has been an issue since Mickey sustained a concussion when a large, frozen iguana fell on his head during a Florida freeze. Hoping to avoid foreclosure, Sue accepted a job teaching Mandarin Chinese to businessmen in China, leaving Wahoo and Mickey on their own.

One day a woman named Raven Stark from the TV show “Extreme Survival” approaches Mickey. She offers him big money to use Alice in an episode. The Crays despise fake outdoor shows but need the money.

When they meet the show’s star Derek Badger, they know there’ll be trouble. Derek is flabby, spray-tanned and insufferably arrogant. The script has him narrowly escaping an alligator, a simple task with docile Alice until Badger does something stupid and gets his pants caught on one of Alice’s teeth, forcing Mickey to dive in and save the idiot.

The fiasco looks good on film, so the pampered star insists on filming the rest of the episode using only real wild animals. As Mickey and Wahoo prepare for the trip into the Everglades, they meet one of Wahoo’s classmates, Tuna Gordon. She has a serious black eye thanks to her drunken father. Wahoo convinces his father to take Tuna with them.

To clarify, Wahoo’s father named him after a once-famous professional wrestler/Miami Dolphins player, Wahoo McDaniel. Tuna isn’t sure how she got it, but she hates her name as much as Wahoo hates his.

The crew sets up a base at Sickler’s Landing, hire airboats and head for a suitable island to film on. Derek’s signature trick is grabbing some innocent critter, killing it and cooking it for a meal. If he can’t cook it, he eats it alive. Mickey and Wahoo hope to prevent any such senseless injuries to the ‘glades inhabitants.

Things go from bad to worse in no time. After Derek gets nipped by a frightened snake, a big thunderstorm halts filming. Later he grabs a disoriented bat and tries to swallow it alive, but the bat chomps onto his tongue. By the next morning Derek’s tongue is swollen and he’s feverish. Believing he’s turning into a vampire, he steals an airboat and soon crashes it on a nearby island.

As the storms continue, the crew limps back to Sickler’s to organize a search for Derek. Without thinking, Tuna has used Sickler’s phone to ask her father to feed her hamster. Now the crazy drunk is there to take his daughter back. What follows is a chaotic tangle of narrow escapes, hostage taking and deadly pursuits combined with a desperate search for the foolhardy TV star.

Somehow the kids, Gordon, Mickey and Derek Badger all end up on the same island. The trigger-happy Gordon thinks he’s in control, but he has no idea how resourceful two kids and a crazed TV star can be.

The ensuing melee ends with Gordon’s arrest and hospital stays for the wounded. Within weeks Wahoo’s life has returned to normal. Their bills are paid, the show has a new star, Mickey has been hired as a consultant with Wahoo his assistant, and Tuna has joined her mother in Chicago. Along the way two young people have learned about themselves and what it takes to be a real survivor.

We can learn a lot from every experience. Books from your public library offer insights, ideas and adventures galore. Why not stop by soon and check it out?

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