It was so interesting reading this, perhaps Thompson's most famous pulp nasty, just after having read his last, semi-sentimental potboiler, South of Heaven. (There's even a character in this one who drifts into town after working on the pipeline perhaps described in that much later novel!) In my review of that book, I noted how, at the end of his life, after finally having some success in film and TV, and having made some important admirers of his pulp stuff in the movie world, my feeling was that he attempted to combine a bit the grungy pulp style with the greater literary concerns of his first couple of failed "Okies in the dust bowl" serious Steinbeckian novels. There, too, I wondered how hostile Thompson must have felt toward the publishers and readers who kind of forced him, in order to survive, to write this drecky stuff, which he must have both loved (given how good he was at writing it) and, at the same time, hated, given that it wasn't really what he wanted to be writing about, or how he wanted to represent the people from his part of the country, I imagine--as a bunch of greedy psychopaths, degenerates, alcoholics, and murderers.

I think this novel answers that question. What if the protagonist is the author, driven to dumb himself down for an undeserving public, a self-repression that, in its turn, also forces him to brutally murder even the people closest to him? It makes perfect sense to me. The extra brutality and super cynicism of Thompson's pulp may well be his own working out of his frustrations with writing. In turn, of course, this intense frustration and cynicism made for the very best pulp. It's just devastating.