Things, of course, don’t go to the accepted standard of well. If that’s not fooling around, I wonder what is. So says the man who arrived at the Mint Hotel tripping so hard on acid that all he could see were lizards and carpets of blood. And we were gathered here in Las Vegas for a very special assignment: to cover the Fourth Annual ‘Mint 400’ … and when it comes to things like this, you don’t fool around. We were, after all, the absolute cream of the national sporting press. The man from Life wanted no part of it he slumped deeper into his crouch. She’d been mooning at his elbows for two hours, and now she was making her move. ‘I’m damn near intolerably handsome down here where I am. ‘ Please stand up! You’d be a very handsome man if you’d just stand up!’ The frog-eyed woman clawed feverishly at his belt. I truly hope things were as barmy as he makes them sound. I truly hope that the sports journalists Thompson encountered at the start of the Mint 400 race were as fucked as he describes in the book. It’s nothing next to Fear and Loathing, though. In comparison with a number of reviews I’ve since glanced at, I bucked the trend by enjoying it in all its flawed naivety. The only other book by Thompson that I’ve read is The Rum Diary, which I read not quite two decades ago. I felt like I needed oblivion, but I’ve got a job and a mortgage and an inbuilt sense of responsibility, so instead of popping over to the local park to see what one of the mildly threatening dealers might have stashed in his baby’s nappy, I chose oblivion at a remove, described by a man with a stronger liver than me. I’m calling it existential nihilism, even though that gives more weight to my ‘so what?’ than it deserves. I’ve been saving it up for a moment such as the one that hit me this week. Sometimes that’s all you can do when you live in darkest South Wales. I think he was attempting to channel Hunter S Thompson. It was given to me by a chaotic and terrifying writer that I once knew. I don’t need to tell you what it’s about. This is a very funny book, chaotically and terrifyingly so. Tags 6degrees 20 Books of Summer 1001 Books Africa America Art Australia Autobiography Biography Black culture Black history Blogging about blogging Book review Britain Canada Cats Comedy Crime Dystopia Economics England Fantasy Feminism Film France Germany Graphic novel Historical fiction History Horror Humour Independent Publisher India Influx Press Italy Japan Journalism LGBTQ London Mental health Meta Music Mystery New York Paris Philosophy Picture Prompt Book Bingo Poetry Politics Psychology Racism Randomness Religion Russia Science Science Fiction SciFi Scotland Short stories Six Degrees of Separation Sociology Spain Speculative fiction Sweden Thriller Tokyo Translation Travel United Kingdom USA Wales War Women's Prize for Fiction Women in translation Women in translation month
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