“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers… and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.
Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”
“Fear and Loathing” is one of Hunter S Thompson’s disturbing yet most successful works. The novel, which was published in the United States 1971 and was also made into a film, consistently achieves to cause uneasiness to the reader, which almost reaches panic attacks, but still thrills him/her with its craziness and abstrusity.
The story deals with the sports reporter Raoul Duke who makes a trip to Las Vegas with his lawyer in the early 70ies in order to report about the motorsports event “Mint 400”, an off-road race. Nevertheless, they start to get seduced by the sweet jag of the drugs and experience an adventure which is beyond our imaginations.
The trips are described in an extremely elaborate and exciting way. One starts to wonder how this works. The answer is quite as horrific as obvious. “Fear and Loathing” is a roman à clef, which means that it can be based on Thompson’s own experiences or on other real events where names and dates are changed in order to protect the protagonists.
The book brims over with anarchy and craziness, and is definitively worth reading.
Image Source: http://www.arcatatheater.com/2014/fear-and-loathing-in-las-vegas-1998/
