The primary focus of Kevin McEneaney's overview of Hunter Thompson's work is his ostensibly literary output, considered as in a sense differentiated from the more strictly journalistic writing produced by the King of Gonzo. The author moves chronologically through Thompson's life, structuring the book as a kind of pseudo-biography, but placing the emphasis on dealing in turn with what he takes to be the major books – The Rum Diary (written in the 1960s, published in 1998), Hell's Angels (1967), Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (1971; McEneaney devotes a chapter each to analysing Parts One and Two of the novel, which McEneaney considers Thompson's masterpiece), and the enigmatic The Curse of Lono (1983). While there are a couple of chapters on shorter works by Thompson – one on key examples of the early journalism, such as “The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy” (1970) and “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” (1970), and another on notable work, mostly short fiction, such as the unpublished “Polo Is My Life,” from towards the end of Thompson's career – McEneaney is clearly primarily interested in considering his subject first as a writer of fiction, and, even when considering the nonfiction, still as a writer of books, in the sense of book-length works, rather than of shorter journalism. (This is, I assume, the reason for the somewhat conspicuous absence of any extended consideration of the seminal Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail: ’72 (1973), which collected Hunter's coverage of the presidential election campaign for Rolling Stone magazine.) McEneaney strives to contextualize Thompson within American (and world) literature, rather than within American (and world) journalism, and this is no bad thing.

The central point in McEneaney's examination of Gonzo is the assertion that beneath the exuberant dark humour and over-the-top style which are the appeals of Thompson's work visible on the surface, these books have, woven into their structures, their prose, and their philosophical meditations, an all but staggering array of references outward, throughout American literature and culture, and beyond, and that both these references and their significance(s) have not necessarily been given the consideration that they should be, either by critics, scholars, or casual readers. As McEneaney points out, Hunter Thompson was considerably better-read than people tended to realize, and this is reflected in the work. What McEneaney's book is, first and foremost, is a journey through the books Thompson wrote, examining, in detail (and with the help of both the letters that Thompson penned while he was writing them, and, more centrally, of McEneaney's own unavoidably impressive erudition), the ways in which they relate, in form and content, to the literary/philosophical context of Thompson as a writer, from the enduring influence of Homer, through great American humorists like Mark Twain and James Thurber, and great American novelists like Jack Kerouac, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway and (always) F. Scott Fitzgerald, to interactions with contemporaries such as Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion. But it goes into considerably more detail than this, illuminating references to forgotten aspects of sociopolitical context such as inside jokes from the 1960s counterculture, pop-culture references to contemporary music and movies which may be obscure to the twenty-first-century reader, and references to European literature and philosophy from François Rabelais and James Joyce to (the still largely untranslated into English) Alphonse Karr and Paul Gauguin's Tahitian Journal. This is the great strength of McEneaney's book. In a sense it skilfully, engagingly and extremely knowledgably annotates Hunter Thompson's books, illuminating the intricacies of the intertextualities out of which they are woven.

Because of this angle of approach, of course, other aspects of considering Thompson as a writer are to a certain extent neglected. Though McEneaney is interested in the theme of “journalism” within Gonzo, Hunter's journalism-qua-journalism is not really a main focus here, and even when it is, it is perhaps apprehended as literature first and as journalism second. This leads to a relative deemphasizing of both Hunter the political reporter and Hunter the sportswriter. As I said, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail: ’72 is barely mentioned, and more than that, Thompson's political reporting in general is not really engaged with, although the political themes in the works considered by McEneaney, of course, are. Similarly, despite the consideration of some examples of Gonzo sports journalism, they are not really examined as sports journalism. But these things are not of the essence. McEneaney sets out to assert Thompson's importance, as an American man of letters of the first rank, and he succeeds, in the process providing a valuable guide to interpreting these books through the prisms of authorial intent and intertextuality, filling a significant gap in the ever-increasing body of scholarship surrounding Gonzo.