‘Bamboo’ not for everyone but it’s still pretty funny

“The Big Bamboo”

by Tim Dorsey (William Morrow, 336 pages, $24.95)

Every Tim Dorsey novel is a wacky, lighthearted celebration of depravity and violence. Think Hunter Thompson meets The Three Stooges. Or maybe Carl Hiaasen meets Ted Bundy.

Dorsey’s eighth and latest book is called “The Big Bamboo,” and it features, among other things, a gang of geriatric con men, a Japanese hit man with a full-face skull tattoo and, of course, Dorsey’s irrepressible series character, Serge Storms.

Serge, for those who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him, is a fun-loving, obsessive-compulsive psychotic who kills only the annoying morons and petty villains you might shoot, stab, bludgeon, garrote, drown, blow up, beat to death or feed to sharks yourself if you weren’t squeamish about that sort of thing.

Serge’s latest improbable obsession is relocating the film industry from Hollywood to his home state of Florida.

“Why, you ask? I’ll tell you,” he says. “Guess what the biggest-grossing film in Florida history is. Are you trying to guess? Tick-tock, tick-tock, times up! ‘Deep Throat.’ “

With this noble quest at its center, the plot swings wildly between Florida, Alabama, Ohio, Japan and Hollywood and somehow manages to include an oil swindle, Japanese mobsters, crooked movie deals, a vile nursing home operator, John Goodman, the redneck mafia, scads of illegal drugs, The Eagles, the longest ransom note in history and some fiendishly creative ways to kill people who will not be missed.

Somehow, the whole thing ends up making sense, unlike Dorsey’s last novel, the incomprehensible “Torpedo Juice.”

Dorsey tells his story in a writing style that can be described only as manic. Corpses pile up like spring bugs on a windshield, and both clever gags and cheap shots fly like bullets at a drive-by.

Says Serge when his drug-addled friend, Coleman, worries that the two thugs they stuffed in their trunk might be uncomfortable: “Not my fault. Detroit cutting corners again, this time trunk space. At a minimum, I want room enough for two bodies.”

Clearly, “The Big Bamboo” is not for everyone. Already, it is being trashed by reviewers from the “drug addiction, rape and murder aren’t funny” school of literary criticism and by nit-pickers who think plots need to be at least a tad plausible.

But if you’re the kind of person who laughs with Tony Soprano and Paulie Walnuts and who thinks Hiaasen’s slapstick noir novels are just too darned subtle, Tim Dorsey will make you laugh until your sides split.