Fear and Loathing is famous through osmosis: the opening chapters, the lines about bats, ether, drug collections, etc. The first quarter or so of the novel is justly famous. The rest of it... one wonders. After Duke & his lawyer wake up to go to the race, most of the rest is fairly unmemorable (in particular, the two halves stitched together structure is fairly crude.) The story is not terribly long, and it feel like the mostly-nonfiction it is: drug fiction tends to the 'you had to be there' kind of humor, and we were none of us there.

It also aspires to a greater import than it ever achieves, gesturing toward the 'American dream' and finding 'fear and loathing', which from this remote perspective, looks like bombast & bluff - we know the Nixonian moment would pass in an epic crash, that the USSR would fall, that the War on Drugs would not be "a boot stamping on a human face - forever". (In particular, the famous 'wave' quote seems arbitrary and unsupported by its surrounding text, although I don't doubt that Thompson felt those sentiments deeply.) So, the opening is fantastic, but the rest isn't really worth reading now, for an average less than its repute would suggest.