Screwjack: A Short Story -- Hunter S. Thompson

<b>A rare collection of wild and outlandish short stories--long thought to be lost--by literary legend Hunter S. Thompson.</b> <p/>Hunter S. Thompson's notorious triptych <i>Screwjack</i> is as salacious, unsettling, and brutally lyrical as it has been rumored to be since its private printing in 1991. <p/>"We live in a jungle of pending disasters," Thompson warns in the opening piece "Mescalito," a fictionalized chronicle of his first mescaline experience and what it sparked in him while he was alone in an Los Angeles hotel room in February 1969---including a bout of paranoia that would have made most people just scream no, once and for all. But for Thompson, along with the downside came a burst of creativity too powerful to ignore. The result is a poetic, perceptive, and wildly funny stream-of-consciousness take on 1969 America as only Hunter S. Thompson could see it. <i>Screwjack</i> just gets weirder with its second offering, "Death of a Poet," which describes a trailer park confrontation with a deservingly doomed friend. The heart of the collection lies in its final, title piece, an unnaturally poignant love story ostensibly written by Thompson's alias Raoul Duke from <i>Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas</i>. What makes the romantic tale "Screwjack" so touching, for all its strangeness, is the aching melancholy in its depiction of the modern man's burden. <p/><i>Screwjack</i> shows how brilliant a prose stylist Thompson really is, amid all the hilarity. As he puts it in his