Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson (1966): Thompson's first full-length book points the way towards what was dubbed his 'Gonzo Journalism' (heavily rearranged, partially fictionalized, intensely subjective reporting) while nonetheless remaining fairly straightforward. 50 years after the events and people Thompson covers, the book still packs quite a punch.
Thompson managed to insinuate himself into a West Coast Hell's Angels chapter for about a year during what was really the first mass-culture awareness of the Hell's Angels (which were, at the time, a fairly small assortment of West Coast motorcycle gangs). Amidst fairly quick snapshots of the history the rise of motorcycle gangs (in America, a post-WWII, California-centric phenomenon at the beginning), Thompson also critiques the various hysterical media and public response to biker gangs.
But while Thompson takes care to contextualize and humanize the various bikers he comes into contact with, he doesn't sentimentalize them: this is a book that does end, hyperbolically, with Thompson quoting Heart of Darkness in relation to the Angels ("Exterminate the brutes."). Some of Thompson's sociological speculation about the roots of biker culture lying in America's long-standing, migratory White Trash community comes across as less than a little half-baked -- but he also seems to be on to something.
Thompson's Hell's Angels -- swastika-wearing, rape-culture-glorifying, knee-jerk violent, loyal to one another, fascist in their essential make-up, deeply racist -- ultimately come across as being the barbaric forebears of such things as today's Tea Party.
Obviously, Thompson couldn't make that connection in 1966. But his lengthy exegesis on the nihilistic tribalism of the Angels could just as well be describing the ultimately nihilistic, destruction-worshiping, violence-loving Far Right of the American 21st century. Loyalties exist only within one's own tribe. People outside that tribe aren't just disposable -- they aren't really people. And everyone is against you. As the jacket copy says, a strange and terrible saga. Highly recommended.
Savage Night by Jim Thompson (1953): Prolific thriller writer Jim Thompson wrote the sort of pulp that literary critics came to love over the course of his lengthy career. There's a fully realized sense to the worlds he created in his novels, even an early one like Savage Night, that makes them unforgettably bleak.
He most often focused his narratives on murderers and monsters; Savage Night makes its first-person narrator, a Mob hit-man who's been on the run for years only to be pulled back in for one more assassination, pitiful and human and utterly awful. But so is almost everyone around him, as is typical in a Thompson novel: there are very few good people in the world his characters inhabit.
For more than half a decade, the narrator 'hid' inside the guise of a poor but honest man. And he truly believes that he was a decent person for those years. But by the end of the novel, even that assessment will be in doubt. Thompson's characters often possess radically destabilized senses of self. Nothing is certain.
Savage Night hums along in its brevity. Our narrator becomes, if not sympathetic, than at least pitiable. And the oft-discussed final thirty pages take the characters into the realms of broken consciousness and the almost surreal. It's one hell of a denouement. Highly recommended.
Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson (1964): Famously moved to French Africa and adapted to film by Bernard Tavernier in 1981 as Coup de Torchon, Pop. 1280 occurs in novel form in the pre-World-War-One American South, in the smallest county in its state. And possibly the most corrupt.
Our first-person narrator, the sheriff of this small county, makes the psychotic narrating lawman of Thompson's earlier The Killer Inside Me look like Sherlock Holmes by comparison. His sole redeeming feature is disgust at the racism of the poor whites around him. That's it. That's all he's got.
Well, perhaps he's redeemed also by his role as Nemesis to some pretty terrible people -- but as he also wipes out the innocent, he is, ultimately, no saint. Our narrator has spent his life as a lawman gliding by, doing little, taking bribes, protecting the status quo -- and pretending to be far, far stupider and more guileless than he truly is. Or maybe he's always been doing terrible things behind the scenes.
Among other pleasures, Pop. 1280 offers the reader a grad course in unreliable narration -- an escalating, almost vertiginous lesson in this by the end of the novel. The inside of the narrator's head turns out to be a labyrinth. But the Minotaur seems to be all the bloody, terrible, despicable things people do to one another because they're damned and because they can. There is no Theseus, and no thread leading to safety. This is perhaps Thompson's bleakest depiction of humanity in general and America in particular. Highly recommended.
The Shapes of Midnight by Joseph Payne Brennan, introduced by Stephen King, containing the following stories: "Diary of a Werewolf" (1960); "Disappearance" (1959); "The Corpse of Charlie Rull" (1959); "Canavan's Back Yard" (1958); "The Pavillion" (1959); "House of Memory" (1967); "The Willow Platform" (1973); "Who Was He?" (1969); "The Horror at Chilton Castle" (1963); "The Impulse to Kill" (1959); "The House on Hazel Street" (1961); and "Slime" (1953) (Collected 1980):
Veteran dark-fantasy and suspense writer Joseph Payne Brennan, whose name sounds English but who was actually rural New English, penned about a hundred short stories over his career. Maybe more. Stephen King liked him a lot, which explains the generous King introduction to this, one of Brennan's few mass-market collections.
This constitutes a 'Best of' collection, bringing together most of Brennan's finest short stories and novellas. His style is mostly unornamented but flexible -- the best story here, "Canavan's Back Yard," echoes M.R. James, while other stories function quite thoroughly in the rural horror vein of someone like Manly Wade Wellman, only with a New England setting and reserve that King himself seems to have occasionally tried to emulate.
There are also a couple of fairly gentle bits of whimsy in the tradition of Ray Bradbury, "The House on Hazel Street" and "House of Memory," and one bit of rural Lovecraftiana, "The Willow Platform," which by the end seems like a much sharper and better written version of an August Derleth pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft.
The three best stories are often anthologized, with the aforementioned "Canavan's Back Yard" being a true and deservedly praised gem of gradually accumulating horror. "Slime" is a terrific bit of science-fictional horror, giving us one of the more disturbing visitors from the Briny Deep in horror history.
"The Horror at Chilton Castle" is also a delight, a bit of an homage to the English Gothic tale. Sharp and enjoyable, these stories suggest that Brennan deserves a wider readership now -- those who admire Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch would probably be most gratified by this collection. Highly recommended.
Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie (The Gonzo Papers Volume 4) by Hunter S. Thompson (1994): Scattershot but enjoyable chronicle of the 1992 U.S. Presidential election from Gonzo journalist Thompson, who by this time was more eminence grise than enfant terrible when it came to political reporting.
There's the usual mix of reality, speculation, and confabulation one expects from Thompson, though the book is surprisingly thin -- illustrations and copies of notes and memos pad out the length, and it ain't that long to begin with.
Some sections bring that old Fear and Loathing magic, though, including a bizarre Arkansas bar experience with Bill Clinton campaign manager James Carville and an even more bizarre lunch with Bill Clinton at the height of the campaign. And a description of George H.W. Bush as being some Lovecraftian leftover afterbirth from Reagan's 1980 win is terrific, and apt.
Thompson is, if anything, angrier and more cynical than ever about the American political process. He backs Clinton because he views George Bush as a dissembling monster, but he doesn't much like Clinton either, whom he views as a man without a sense of humour. More relevant to our present-day situation, Thompson now views all presidential candidates as essentially hollow men in the pursuit of power.
At least Nixon, as Thompson notes in the epilogue penned after his nemesis's death, was truly evil. Bush and Clinton (and third-party candiate Ross Perot) are vacuous power-seekers who will do anything to get and retain power but have no real underlying structure to what they want to do with power. Nixon, of course, wanted power so he could destroy all his enemies, real and imagined. Recommended.
The Great Shark Hunt: The Gonzo Papers Volume 1: written by Hunter S. Thompson (1956-79; collected 1979): Ridiculously long and curiously arranged, this collection of essays and excerpts by Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the America of the 1960's and 1970's.
Or the America of now. Because the scum also rises, still.
The early pieces demonstrate a Thompson in the process of developing that occasionally fictional non-fiction style known as Gonzo, where the Journalist Is There, though he may rearrange events to more cogently make a point. The normal undergrad thing to do is to latch onto Thompson's tales of drug use, ether-quaffing road trips, and general bad behaviour.
But he's a keen observer and commenter upon social and political topics. Much of that near-stream-of-consciousness prose still crackles, as do his observations from the underbelly of America. And by underbelly, I really mean all of America. Presidential campaigns are as scum-soaked and vile as any crime scene or ordeal of police brutality. Watergate is a doomsday that never quite gets to wipe the slate clean. Viet Nam is a horror.
Thompson's bete noire was Richard Nixon, but the Gonzo bile also spews on career Democratic political hack Hubert Humphrey, the idiots of the Democratic Party establishment, Gerald Ford and his soul-destroying decision to pardon Nixon without a trial, fat cats of all types, and bastards, bastards, bastards.
It might be nice to have Thompson around today to peer agog at American politics and American society, but it wouldn't necessarily reveal anything new. Sucking scum like Mitt Romney are eternal in their existence, changing only in their names and appearances. Highly recommended.
