Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

There are books you don’t really read — you survive them. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson is one of those. Not because it’s difficult — the prose is actually dizzying and addictive — but because it drags you into a state of mind where the line between fiction and reality shatters like a broken mirror.

And in some way, I was grateful for that.

It transported me, literally. Not just into the mind of its protagonist, but into a version of Las Vegas that (I can assure you) no longer exists. I walked those streets not long ago, and I couldn’t help but see the ghosts: hotels that closed down years ago, ways of living the city that have vanished, like an old dance hall buried under dust.

Out of all that chaos, I brought back a few memories that still wander around in my head.

• “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

• “In a closed society where everybody is guilty, the only crime is being caught.”

And an unexpected wink: the mention of Argentine boxer Ringo Bonavena, floating like a lost hook in a sea of LSD and paranoia.

At the time, Fear and Loathing wasn’t just a literary experiment. It was also a manifesto: Thompson helped define what would later be known as gonzo journalism, a style that doesn’t try to hide the narrator’s subjectivity — it embraces it.

Reporting the facts wasn’t the point: it was about showing the trembling hands holding the mirror.

Blending factual reporting with personal experience isn’t an accident — it’s the heart of gonzo.

The story isn’t so much about what happens out there, but about what happens inside, while the outside collapses into something wild and untouchable.

But did the book fascinate me?

The answer is a bit more complicated.

As I went deeper, I felt like the stories started to pile up, like layers of the same worn-out fabric. The initial feeling — the confusion, the madness, the brutal clarity hidden inside hallucinations — was already delivered in the first pages. The rest felt like a repetition, as if Thompson wanted to make sure you really got the message… by beating it into you.

It was chaos cloning itself over and over again, like two mirrors reflecting each other into infinity. Wikipedia: Fractal

And underneath it all, pulsing like a background noise, you could hear the echo of Chaos Theory: tiny deviations that grow wildly until what began as a drug-fueled trip ends up portraying the complete breakdown of an era, a country, and an idea of civilization.

The incoherence of the story isn’t a flaw — it mirrors the incoherence of its time.

This book is a freefall chronicle of the collapse of the 60s dream — a time that believed in revolution, in free love, in the doors of perception blown wide open — only to dissolve into a desert of fear, drugs, and despair.

Would I recommend it?

Yes — but not like someone offering a fine wine, more like someone pointing toward a storm:

“If you want to understand what the nightmares of the American Dream were made of, go ahead and cross the door. Just don’t expect to find shelter on the other side.”