Spike Magazine

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Feature [published February 2001]
Hunter S. Thompson: Fear And Loathing
Nathan Cain reflects on the journalistic legacy of an elderly dope fiend
I found Hunter S. Thompson by accident. I was looking
through the stacks at my local public library, searching
for something, I don’t remember what, when I read the
title Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas on the spine of an
orange paperback. It sounded vaguely familiar, so I took
it off the shelf. The cover featured a cartoonish drawing
of a man in a Hawaiian shirt with a long cigarette holder
and a suitcase, looking very guilty about something. A
jacket blurb by Tom Wolfe called the work I held in my
hand a “scorching epochal sensation.” (Which is, in my
opinion, the finest jacket blurb in the history of jacket
blurbs. Congratulations Mr Wolfe.) I was intrigued, so
I opened the book and read the infamous first sentence,
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of
the desert when the drugs began to take hold…” I had
found exactly what I had been searching for.
I was a 17-year-old high school student at the time
(an appellation which held the same appeal for me as
terminal cancer patient) and the tale of a sportswriter
and his crazed 300lb. Samoan attorney on a drug binge
so foul and extreme that it would have turned the most
dedicated libertine into a card carrying member of the
Prohibition Party was one of the most scabrously funny
pieces of work I had ever read. It was a wonderful tale
of possibility gone horribly awry, and by the time I was
finished with it I had a lot of questions.
Who was this lunatic Thompson? Why hadn’t I heard
of him before? Why was this book classified as nonfiction?
Was it humanly possible to behave that badly and
live to tell about it?
Thompson was in the right place at the right time
and he did the right thing, clamping down on a raw
nerve in the American psyche like a cranked crazed
Gila monster, suffusing the collective consciousness
with his own particular brand of poison. In the process
he became the most celebrated, or at least most
notorious, journalist of his era. Thompson’s poison
still runs through the veins of America, and by extension
the rest of the world, whose different regions, in
varying degrees, are subject to regular transfusions
of American culture. Thompson’s trademark phrase
“Fear and Loathing” and its various permutations
(fear and losing, fear and loaning, fear and loading…)
have become clichés. He inspired Gary Trudeau to
BUY Hunter S. Thompson books online from and
519
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