Book Review: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Publisher: Harper Perennial 
Published: 2014
Type: Kindle E-book

What’s it about?

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold… And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas…”

So begins ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, ace Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s savage dissection of the American dream. As knights of old buckled on armour of supernatural power, so Hunter Thompson entered Las Vegas armed with a veritable arsenal of ‘heinous chemicals’. His perilous, drug-enhanced confrontations with casino operators, bartenders, police officers and assorted representatives of the Silent Majority have a hallucinatory humour and nightmare terror never before seen on the printed page.

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas centres around journalist Raoul Duke (based on Hunter S. Thompson), a sport writer who is tasked with heading to Las Vegas to report on the Mint 400 desert race. Given credit and free reign, Raoul hires a convertible and heads out to Sin City accompanied by his attorney, Dr Gonzo (based on Thompson’s friend, activist Oscar Zeta Acosta). However, they aren’t alone. Oh no. In the boot of their car is an eye-wateringly vast array of drugs. Everything from a salt shaker filled with cocaine, a pint of raw ether, uppers and downers, weed, obscene amounts of alcohol and pellets of mescaline to name but a few.

Thompson pioneered “Gonzo journalism”, a style of writing where the author is at the heart of the first person narrative, giving an intensely personal and subjective viewpoint of an experience, rather than a distant, objective re-telling which is the norm in standard journalism. This mixture of fact and creative licence means that, in Thompson’s hands, we’re in for one hell of a ride. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a mash-up of a few Vegas trips which Thompson and Acosta themselves took. Using notes and tape recordings that he made at the time, Thompson crafted everything together and handed it to Rolling Stone magazine. The rest, as they say, is history. Published in the magazine in 1971 as a two part story, Gonzo journalism was born, as was one of the most iconic drug narratives ever published.

As soon as I finished the book, I wrote down my initial feelings in a tweet. The sentence I used was: ‘One of the most crazy, trippy, funny, nonsensical and observant books I’ve read.’ Now, it’s been a few weeks since I closed the cover on Thompson’s most famous book; the dust has settled and I’ve had chance to mull things over. Do I still feel the same? Absolutely.

It’s hard to quantify or even attempt to explain this book. Essentially, it’s 217 pages (give or take) of drug-fuelled narrative which often makes very little sense. It’s the epitome of excess; it’s depressing; it’s uplifting; it’s dark; it’s humorous; it’s confusing; it’s illuminating. Every possible conflicting thing you could think of, this book embodies. To be honest, attempting to rationalize or attach significant meaning to the story seems pretty fruitless and goes against the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants style that the book adopts.

Half of the time I had absolutely no clue what was going on, where I was up to or what exactly the characters were vocalizing, but I really couldn’t care less. That isn’t the point of the book; you aren’t truly meant to “understand”. We’re told that the main character is in a search for the American Dream, but the book ends up becoming a hazy rebellion in the face of the optimism and supposed possibility of said Dream. The Dream certainly isn’t present within the shady parts of Vegas, where drug binges, lawlessness and shady characters reign supreme. Through the significantly altered – OK, OK, he’s completely off his face – perceptions of Raoul Duke, you see the absurd nature of reality alongside a scathing retrospect on the culture of the 1960’s.

This is such a maverick book in terms of subject matter and style, firmly planting it in the ‘exceptionally risky’ category, but this risk completely and utterly pays off. For some readers it may be too abstract or may seemingly glorify anti-social and criminal behaviour, but Thompson successfully manages to encapsulate the tone of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s drug culture in the most descriptively flamboyant way. The book made me laugh countless times (like, REALLY laugh) and in amongst the seemingly incoherent nonsense there are some real jarring moments of genius and clarity.

My Rating: