“Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” appears, again, in “Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. One might even trace the impulse back another decade, to 1979’s “The Great Shark Hunt,” but I’ve always been partial to that collection, which gathers his original 1965 Hell’s Angels piece for the Nation (Carey McWilliams was his assigning editor), as well as such gonzo landmarks as “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” and “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” which details the 1970 killing by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy of Times columnist Ruben Salazar. Composed in the early 1960s, it was lost, or set aside, after he couldn’t get it published, only to be rediscovered in 1998.īy then, Thompson was all about recycling - beginning with “Songs of the Doomed” (1990), his books take on the catch-as-catch-can aspect of scrapbooks, full of outtakes and B-sides with occasional bursts of brilliance, refracted through the filter of his myth.

Call it Fear and Loathing in Puerto Rico, I suppose.Īll of which is well and good, except for this: “The Rum Diary” (Simon & Schuster: 204 pp., $15 paper) is not vintage Thompson rather, it is pre-vintage, an example of the author’s work in utero, the earliest of his writings to appear in print. Nothing happens until one of them - a Thompson stand-in named Paul Kemp, played by Johnny Depp - sees the other’s tongue start to grow out of his mouth like some tubular pink snake.ĭepp humps and haws, his mannerisms not unlike those he used when playing Thompson in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” a portrayal modeled closely on Thompson himself. Two journalists are sitting around a derelict San Juan, Puerto Rico, apartment, having just ingested an unknown hallucinogen. Thompson novel, there’s a scene that appears to come straight from the author’s vintage work. Toward the end of “The Rum Diary,” the film based on the Hunter S.

Hunter fear and loathing