Including a chronicle of his first mescaline experience, a trailer-park confrontation and ending with an unnaturally poignant love story, Screwjack is an exhilarating collection of short stories. As Thompson puts it in his introduction, the three stories here ‘build like Bolero to a faster & wilder climax that will drag the reader relentlessly up a hill, & then drop him off a cliff . . . That is the Desired Effect.’ Amid all the hilarity, Hunter S. Thompson proves just how brilliant a prose stylist he really is. Screwjack is salacious, unsettling, and brutally lyrical. ‘Hunter Thompson elicits the same kind of admiration one would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria’s funeral’ William F Buckley ‘There are only two adjectives writers care about anymore, brilliant and outrageous, and Hunter S. Thompson has a freehold on both of them’ Tom Wolfe