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John Marlin is the game warden in Blanco County, Texas. As one might expect, this job keeps him busy enough without the crazies coming to town. Which they do, en masse and with tabloid reporter outriders, when a chupacabra is rumored to have killed a man. A chupacabra is, literally translated, a goat-sucker: a mythical, vampire-like creature whose appearance is horrendous, but never described the same way twice, at least not in FLAT CRAZY. The chupacabra didn't kill Oliver Searcy. Duke Waldrip did, with a screwdriver to the spinal column, when Searcy threatened him with a gun and public exposure for cheating Searcy with a fake, trophy-size, deer mount. Searcy isn't the first person Duke has cheated, just the first one he's killed. Billy Don Craddock, with a lot of prompting from his buddy Red O'Brien, decides to catch the chupacabra. Red and Billy Don are classic dumb red-neck kinda guys. Their family trees don't fork. First they just want to kill the monster, but then the financial ramifications of having the only chupacabra around sink in, and they decide to trap it. They set the trap on Kyle Dawson's ranch. Kyle has connections to Duke, and to the guys making the porno movies with the Chinese dwarves. So why can't anybody find him? More people get killed. Chinese dwarves making porno movies require large deer antlers, which are known to have major aphrodisiac powers. John Marlin gets misquoted on national television, which only encourages the riff-raff, which is a bad thing. The good thing is his romantic involvement with the tabloid reporter. The blurbs compare Ben Rehder to Carl Hiassen and Elmore Leonard. I guess I just don't get the joke. The writing is good. The characters are well-developed and believable; I didn't particularly like any of them, and didn't much care about John Marlin one way or the other. The plot was fine, just pushing the edge of 'I don't believe THAT could really happen' without going over. I thought things went kind of flat in the middle of the book, and had to keep pushing myself to keep reading. Everything winds up relatively neat and tidy at the end, and life goes on. But I didn't think this was a particularly funny book, and I won't go out of my way to read Rehder's first two books (BUCK FEVER and BONE DRY). Again, this isn't a bad mystery or even a mediocre mystery, it just wasn't to my taste.
Reviewed by P. J. Coldren, October 2004
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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