Assigned to cover an off-road motorcycle race by Sports Illustrated, Thompson instead produced something weirder, what he called “a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream.” As with so many of his pronouncements, this one is rife with overstatement. “Fear and Loathing” is on my mind because I am living this winter and spring in Las Vegas, which he skewered, memorably, in the piece. How, Thompson is asking, do we evoke the feeling of a situation? How do we recreate not only the raw facts of a moment or an incident, but also its sensibility? The bats, of course, are a hallucination - but they are also terrifyingly, fundamentally real, and their presence feels like a necessity, rendering the account more pointed (and, in a way, more accurate) than a traditional report.

…’ And then 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.” “I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded maybe you should drive.

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” he opens “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which remains, 45 years after it was published in book form, perhaps his signature work. In such a landscape, Thompson comes across as the most honest person around. Thompson’s adventures in Las Vegas are chaotic not because of him but because of us, because this is the monument we have built to our prurience and half-articulated desires. Thompson, who had an uncanny ability to use hyperbole as journalistic strategy.

And yet I’ve found myself drawn back to the work of Hunter S. It’s hard, I know, to make a case for gonzo journalism in an age when reality is beset by exaggeration, even lies.

Thompson fear and loathing