That’s right, it’s a guest post! Because I don’t actually know everything, I’m excited to share from-the-trenches pieces by authors and publishing professionals. This galvanizing one is from Mimi Montgomery, whose razor-sharp debut, Murder Bites, is out now. (Be sure to check out the giveaway at the end.) Enjoy!
My first Carl Hiaasen book was his novel “Squeeze Me.” It’s about an elderly Palm Beach socialite who suddenly disappears at the same time a burmese python is on the loose — after which the president residing in the nearby Palm Beach Winter White House blames her disappearance on local immigrants. You can see where this is going.
At the time, I was only tangentially familiar with Hiaasen’s work via his YA novel “Hoot,” which for some reason I assumed was the plotline of “Holes,” but starring owls. (Spoiler: This is not what it’s about at all, namely because owls can’t hold shovels.) And I didn’t know anything about Hiaasen’s backstory — that he was a journalist like I am, that he’d spent decades covering the moshpit that is Florida news and had carved out another career for himself writing zany, satirical mysteries inspired by the same headlines he’d covered for work.
But as I began my journey through the Hiaasen-verse, I became fascinated with the guy and his work. He was hilarious, smart, and irreverent. And in an era where opening your preferred news app each morning can feel like a daily kick to the genitals, he was remixing the onslaught into something of his own, something we could laugh at and maybe even try to make sense of.
So when I finally set out to write a book of my own — which eventually became my debut novel, “Murder Bites” — I figured I’d just pull a Hiaasen and simply let my day job guide me. I was a professional writer, after all, a journalist who’d been covering D.C. for the better half of a decade. I knew I could bang out some sentences, no problem, plus my job had given me more than enough inspo to write my own novel satirizing the culture wars. Drop some light murder in there and a couple jokes, and bam! I’d have a quirky mystery of my own. How hard could it be? I thought, which is the exact thought everyone has before life judo chops their ass with a healthy dose of humility.
As it turns out, writing a novel is very, very hard, and very, very different from journalism. There are no transcripts to pull from, no documents for sourcing, no facts to which you must adhere. It’s just you, alone, sitting at the shitty World Market desk in your guest bedroom and staring at a big ole blank Google Doc. You can literally make up whatever you want.
And at times this was terrifying, especially because I was trying to write a big, zany murder mystery full of camp and romps and weird pop culture references galore. I’d obsessively fixate on whether I was going a little too hard on the whatever you want thing, telling myself that I was a complete idiot who didn’t have the chops to pull off a big Hiaasen swing. That I should just scrap the whole thing and try to write something normal that had more mass appeal, maybe a book about two dragons and a forever-teenage vampire banging each other in a romantasy orgy for four hundred pages.
But then I remembered one very important and freeing cliché, one that has become something of a mantra to me as I start my own journalist-slash-satirical novelist career: Truth is stranger than fiction.
I’ve spent the majority of the past decade scrolling through news headlines for my job. And, no matter where your political inclinations lie, I think we can all agree that every day we are presented with more and more evidence that this cliché rings true. Doubt me? Well, let’s just take a little stroll through some headlines from the past few years: We sent Katy Perry to outer space. The Hawk Tuah girl has a podcast called, amazingly, “Talk Tuah.” I wrote an entire story about a TikTok woman who was straight up building an underground tunnel system beneath her house like she was a freakin’ mole!
Satire often requires using exaggeration or hyperbole to illuminate the absurd in everyday life. And clearly our every day is already pretty wild without the added exaggeration or hyperbole. But I think this is actually something of a gift for writers: Today’s satirists have the chance to pull off some kooky risks with their work because our current baseline is so bananas.
Case in point: In my novel someone dies in an accident involving several 12-foot-tall Home Depot skeletons holding paper mache pumpkin spice lattes, and there’s a major plotline concerning an “America’s Next Top Model”-esque show about designer dogs called “Pawsh.” These are objectively nuts scenarios. But every time I began to doubt myself, I would see another headline and be reminded of the comforting fact that, in a world where women are legitimately getting into fistfights at Target over Stanley cups, anything seems believable.
And I would charge forward with a renewed belief that I could pull it off, because, I’m sorry, but look around — y’all are up to far weirder shit than I could ever make up in my own freaky little brain.
Mimi will send a signed copy of Murder Bites to one lucky subscriber. (US only; enter by 11:59pm ET on Monday, August 17).
A city transplant in a dog-obsessed small town becomes the prime suspect when the local dog walker is murdered in this charmingly quirky and clever mystery.
“A delightful mashup of Desperate Housewives and Best in Show, Murder Bites is laugh-out-loud funny and surprisingly heartwarming. A very fun ride, from a totally original new voice.”—Marisa Kashino, author of the Good Morning America Book Club pick Best Offer Wins
A LITERARY HUB MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR
Margot Cartwright is not exactly blending in with the residents of Glenville, South Carolina. An unwilling transplant from Washington, D.C., Margot feels like a fish out of water among the Lululemon-wearing, tiny-dog-owning, non-New Yorker-reading locals who are clamoring to have their fur babies star on Pawsh, a reality TV show about couture canines. (Sure, Margot loves her dog, but Sid Vicious is far too cool of a mutt for a show like that!) She even feels like an outcast amongst her family, and after she’s caught channeling her inner “Robin Hood” by stealing her neighbors’ pro-Pawsh signs, further cementing her title as the neighborhood pariah, she thinks things can’t possibly get any worse, right?
Wrong. When the local dog walker is killed in a bizarre incident involving an over-the-top Halloween display featuring multiple Home Depot skeletons, all eyes turn to Margot. To clear her name and save her family from falling apart, Margot vows to find the real killer before they strike again—but she can’t do it alone.
Enter Anne, a glamorous septuagenarian widow determined to maintain her reign over the HOA, and Sally-Claire, a "Mom Life" sweatshirt-clad member of the “Mommy Mafia” who might not be as perfect as she seems. Together, the unlikely trio (along with their canine companions) dives into the mystery, navigating the quirky and secretive world of Glenville’s residents. Can they solve the case before it’s too late, or will Margot’s reputation be permanently dog-eared?
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