Chomp (novel)

Chomp
Original cover
Author	Carl Hiaasen
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	adventure comedy
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Publication date	2012
Media type	Print (book)
ISBN	978-0375-96842-6

Chomp is a young adult novel by Carl Hiaasen first published in 2012, and set in Hiaasen's native Florida. It is his fourth young adult novel. His previous three, also about Florida wildlife, are Hoot, Flush and Scat.

Plot Summary

Wahoo Cray and his father, Mickey Cray, a professional animal wrangler, are both hired to assist with the latest episode of a survivalist reality series, titled Expedition: Survival! As Mickey is injured from a freak accident, and suffering the after-effects of a serious concussion, Wahoo takes it upon himself to accept for both of them.

In addition to helping with the animals, Wahoo has to restrain his father, who becomes dangerously short-tempered while dealing with the show's flabby, pampered, and obnoxious star, Derek Badger, who has little experience dealing with actual nature and no interest in learning. While shooting an underwater scene in the Crays' backyard with their pet alligator, "Alice," Derek tries to dramatize the footage by climbing on her back, which causes her to go berserk. Derek is almost killed, before Mickey calmly dives in and pulls him to safety.

Mickey and Wahoo are expecting the filming to be cancelled, but Derek is unexpectedly thrilled with the harrowing footage from the pond, and declares that he wants to shoot a "real" survival experience out in the Everglades, with the Crays' help. Despite their misgivings, Mickey and Wahoo agree, knowing how much their family needs the money.

While buying supplies in Florida City, the Crays are joined by Tuna Gordon, a teenaged classmate of Wahoo's, fleeing her abusive, alcoholic father, Jared Gordon. Unsure what else to do, Wahoo invites her to join them on their camping trip into the Everglades.

Predictably, the shoot in the Everglades is a series of fiascoes. Derek's clumsiness leads him to suffer a number of injuries, including being bitten a dozen times by an agitated Banded Water Snake that he was attempting to kill and eat. Tuna, originally a huge fan of Expedition: Survival!, is dispirited to learn just how fake the show, and Derek, are; for instance, his trademark parachute entrance into the wilderness is performed by a stuntman, and between shooting sessions, he is airlifted by helicopter to a luxury hotel in Miami. She is especially outraged to learn that the script calls for him to kill and eat some random animal, not because he is actually starving, but because his viewers expect him to.

The final fiasco occurs at night, when a lightning storm has grounded the helicopter and forced Derek to camp with the rest of the crew; when a large Mastiff Bat lands unexpectedly in their camp, Derek improvises a scene in which he plans to eat it; the bat chomps his tongue in self-defense, and Mickey has to remove the creature without further mutilating Derek.

The next morning, Derek disappears, hijacking one of the airboats ferrying the crew and their equipment and driving wildly into the swamp. Derek has lapsed into a semi-delirious state, as a result of infection from the bat bite; combined with a secret love for horror movies, he now believes he is in danger of turning into a vampire.

The show's crew organizes a search party from the souvenir shop on the Tamiami Trail they are using as a headquarters. Derek's personal assistant, Raven Stark, receives only lukewarm support from the show's executive producer, who has become exasperated with Derek's costly mistakes and demanding behavior, and is secretly eager for any excuse to replace him as the show's star.

Things are further complicated when Jared Gordon tracks down his daughter at the souvenir shop. In terror, she jumps onto one of the search airboats and pleads with its driver, Link, to help her hide. Wahoo joins her, but Jared Gordon takes Mickey captive, and shoots at the airboat as it is pulling away, seriously wounding Link. Jared then hijacks another airboat to track them down, taking Mickey along as a hostage.

Raven glumly coordinates the search with the Sheriff's Office, who insist on finding Gordon before they can spare any manpower to look for Derek.

Meanwhile, Derek, who has little to no real wilderness experience, is becoming more and more wretched in the Everglades - hungry, thirsty, completely lost, and suffering numerous injuries from mosquitoes, a near-miss from a bolt of lightning, a charge by a feral pig, and numerous falls from trees he is trying to climb.

While Mickey steers the hijacked airboat on an aimless course through the swamp, ensuring that Jared Gordon doesn't get near the kids, Wahoo and Tuna try to find some way of going after them and also getting the wounded Link back to civilization. When their airboat dies, they search the tree island they landed on, and happen upon Derek, half-delirious. They try to bail out the half-sunken airboat Derek stole, but Derek quickly collapses from exhaustion.

Wahoo and Link are briefly separated from Tuna, when Jared Gordon finally tracks her down. Knowing the police are now after him, Gordon demands that Mickey drive him and Tuna out of the swamp and help them escape. Mickey refuses to let Tuna go with her abusive father, so Gordon shoots him in the foot. When Link appears, demanding the return of his airboat, Gordon takes aim with his gun, and Wahoo jumps him. Gordon throws Wahoo aside and raises his gun, but then Derek charges out of the trees and - still delirious - overpowers Gordon by biting him ferociously on the neck, like a vampire. Gordon is tied up when the search parties finally arrive, rushing Mickey and Link to the hospital and placing Gordon under arrest. Wahoo and Tuna both thank Derek for his heroism, and Tuna makes a point of asking for an autograph.

A few months later, the Everglades episode of Expedition: Survival! is broadcast to an enormous audience, thanks to the publicity about Derek's heroic actions in the swamp. However, Derek's contract with the show is not renewed, after he foolishly tries to use this publicity to further inflate his demands for a higher salary. He is replaced by an outdoorsman from New Zealand.

Thanks to some veiled threats from Wahoo's older sister, a lawyer, the show's producers agree to pay Mickey and Wahoo the full amount promised for their services. While the Cray family is watching the Everglades episode on television, Wahoo receives a phone call from Tuna, who is now living with her mother, Gordon's estranged wife, in Chicago. Neither of them is looking forward to testifying at Gordon's criminal trial, but Tuna promises that, regardless, she and her mother will be visiting Florida again. They promise to meet up again soon, addressing each other by the nicknames they pinned on each other during the adventure, "Lance" and "Lucille."

References to Actual History, Science, and Current Events

• Mickey named his son after Edward "Wahoo" McDaniel, his favorite pro wrestler; Wahoo finds the name awkward, since it also belongs to a species of saltwater fish.
• Derek Badger is originally from Canada, but on Expedition: Survival! he uses a fake Australian accent, deliberately copied from Steve Irwin.
• Derek complains that his favorite caterers are not available, and asks suspiciously whether they are cooking for Bear Grylls, another television survivalist; many of the "fake" aspects of Expedition: Survival! are parodies of Grylls's show, Man vs. Wild:
  • Grylls is famous for eating live animals on camera, though it is doubtful he actually needs to do so in order to survive;
  • Grylls is accompanied by a camera crew, meaning he is never in real danger;
  • During some of his "wilderness" shoots, Grylls stayed in nearby hotels in between shooting seasons;
  • Several of the "survival constructs" that Derek uses are built by the crew or local craftsmen, instead of Derek himself;
  • The producers of Man vs. Wild later included an advisory message before each episode, clarifying that Grylls's on-camera actions were meant to be informative, and the audience was not expected to believe that he was actually lost or in real danger.
• The producer of Expedition: Survival! remarks that it is good for the show's publicity for the audience to be worried about Derek being lost in the Everglades, reminding Raven that the survivors of the 2010 Copiapó mining accident "were total rock stars" after surviving their ordeal.
• Tuna has a passion for taxonomy, the scientific naming of plants and animals founded in part by Carl Linnaeus. Examples in the book:
  • American Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) (Chapter Ten, page 90)
  • Raccoon (Procyon lotor) (Chapter Ten, page 90)
  • Banded Water Snake (named Coluber fasciatus by Linnaeus but later renamed Nerodia fasciata) (Chapter Thirteen, page 131)
  • Zebra Swallowtail Butterfly (Eurytides marcellus) (Chapter Sixteen, page 163)
  • Florida Mastiff Bat (Eumops faucinus floridanus) (Chapter Sixteen, page 161)
  • The common, ordinary human being, Homo sapiens (Chapter Twenty-Five, page 279)