Nice hardcover edition. Excellent condition, tight binding. There is a tiny rip on the top of the dust jacket (see photos).
“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. Screwjack 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 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 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.