Hunter S. Thompson's best writing advice is to grab the reader by the short hairs and then offer them something they won’t read anywhere else. In High White Notes, David S. Wills has taken this advice to heart and delivers 100%.

He is not the first to attempt to tell the story of Hunter S Thompson but this is by far the most thorough analysis of Thompson as a writer. By taking an unflinching look at Thompson's writing and lifestyle, Wills offers us a window of insight into a complex man who was much more than the sum of his words.

I first read Thompson' work when I was twelve: my mother taught a summer class on American Literature at the university and I pleaded to be allowed to read long with them. One of those books was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

I had never read anything like it and I know now that no one had read anything like it. Much of it must have gone over my head but I remember being blown away that a journalist could be given an assignment and turn in something completely unrelated to the assignment and still get an A. I understood that this twisting of fact and fiction was something amazing. I would like to think that I understood that I was in the hands of a master. I already knew I wanted to be a writer but I didn't aspire to such heights -- it would be like trying to ride my bike to the moon -- but I remember being amazed that storytelling could look like this.

In High White Notes, Wills invites us on a journey through the phases of Thompson's work, starting with the early experimentation as he tried to find his voice. The descriptions of Thompson's most well known articles tread that tightrope of quoting enough to keep the new reader along without asking us to wade through Thompson's entire opus.

As a reader and a writer, I was particularly fascinated by the way that Wills pulls apart Thompson's words to highlight the component parts of Thompson's instantly recognizable prose before putting it all together again into what we now know as Gonzo journalism. Wills shows us the beauty of the words and sentence structures as well as the dismissive descriptions, throw-away racism and outright lies that were part and parcel of Thompson's best writing.

Wills slices through the myths that Thompson surrounded himself with and proves just how much effort Thompson put into learning to write and writing better. Wills uses Thompson's literary history to show us how Thompson built up his box of writing tools until he was able to do exactly what he'd set out to do in the beginning: mix fact and fiction, using narrative techniques to share the truth with people didn't expect to hear it from someone like him.

"It was not coincidence that my father was a great writer" said his son Juan; this is the tragedy of the myth that Thompson built around himself, that it was supposed to be easy and it never, ever was.

Wills shares Thompson's growth and success but also the professional issues and conflicts. Thompson wasn't just a difficult man politically but also exceedingly hard to work with: when asked to submit a 3,000 word article, he took four weeks and wrote 80,000 words, a book which remains unpublished. And yet, when asked to write a book in response, he spent years failing to ever get it off the ground.

High White Notes is the opposite of a binge read: dense and full of critical detail, ranging from the news of the time and cultural context, building up layer after layer of Thompson's life while peeling back the onion skins of myth and legend and hearsay, even if at the end we might not find anything more than a man that ended up broken, no longer able to achieve the great writing that he strived for from his first years.

I found myself highlighting phrase after phrase, key points jumping out on me on every page, until it started to feel like I was highlighting the whole damn book, just to make sure I get the chance to read it all again.

This is not a romanticization of Thompson's life; Wills shows us Thompson's bad writing along with the good, the high white notes alongside the burned bridges and egotistical posturing that regularly led him to be his own worst enemy. The financial and emotional support that Thompson's ex-wife offered for decades is not swept away but shown to have been crucial to Thompson's success.

High White Notes tracks the tragedy as Thompson became a parody of himself, trying to live up to the vision he created of a drug-fuelled gun nut who simply dashed out pages before ripping them out of his notebook to be published in the national press.

The result is a sympathetic biography of a complicated man, a biography which does not flinch when it comes to Thompson's faults and self-obsession, while breaking down the writing so clearly that it is possible to see when Wills himself uses them to great effect. As Thompson's biographer, Wills holds himself to the standard that Thompson wished for himself: that a story told well should offer a greater truth than any list of facts.

My thank to NetGalley and the publisher Beatdom Books for an advanced copy of this literary study and memoir.

Hunter S. Thompson cast a huge shadow over the cultural and journalistic world, where the word Gonzo meant not just a writing style but a way of life, a religion for the strong and those willing to fight for it, whatever it was. From the outside women wanted him, and men wanted to be him, an outlaw with a savage typewriter and personality. Until editors, journalists, lovers and friends got closer to the good Doctor of Journalism and saw what Gonzo really had done to its creator, a hopeless addict watching his talent drain away, with occasional flashes, but spiraling down to almost parody.

High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism,named for by the feeling and hum that Thompson would feel when the writing was kicking on all cylinders, by David S. Wills is a biography of not just the man Thompson was, but the words he used and how he put them together to create his classic works. Thompson's life was big, brash, and full of edits and rewriting. Tweeking a story to make it better, make Thompson come out better, to beat the man at his own game was a very common thing, something that make biographers have reported as fact in many books on him. An untrustworthy narrator of his own life is a very large part of Thompson's legacy.

Thompson's writing is the real subject of the book. Thompson had skill, and he wrote and rewrote and rewrote to make it perfect, to make it sing, and carry the narrative along. Gonzo was what ruined that gift, being the light at the end of the party, the all eyes on him, destroyed that gift, drove that editorial instinct away, and made it easier for him to hand a bunch of notes to some editor and let the swine make of it what they will.

I have been a fan since I first read Thompson's article about the Kentucky Derby. What the???... I was amazed, confused and envious all at once. The pictures, even without the Steadman drawings were so clear, gross disgusting rich people up to their knees in refuse, I wanted more. Mr. Wills goes deep into how Thompson would create these kind of images, his tricks, his writing. Even a nonfan can learn alot about writing, from reading this book, maybe also how not to lose it.

Mr. Wills seems to have read everything written, written about or written on Hunter Thompson. Not just a interesting biography, the book's approach to the reading is what a reader will remember most. A very revealing and very sad book. All the reader can think about is all the great writing that was never to be. A great gift for a Thompson fan, or a burgeoning writer.

I can't put my finger on this book. Its start made me fear it's patchwork, the result of reading interviews and conducting unstructured Internet digging, just gluing it all together in the end. It's more than that. Its title says a lot: this is a roller-coaster ride through Hunter S. Thompson's writing and how he not only evolved and devolved, but how he created gonzo, a journalistic style that's almost entirely about style and imagination, not fact.

Even though this book, as the author points out, contains a lot of 'implied' and 'claimed', there is analysis to weigh that up. The author goes through many of Thompson's ways of writing, albeit not very deeply.

> Being a student allowed him access to the Columbia University library, where he was able to continue his literary education through borrowing classic and contemporary novels. He became obsessed with Sherwood Anderson’s *Wineburg, Ohio* and Faulkner’s *The Sound and the Fury*. However, undoubtedly the most important book that Thompson read in New York was J.P. Donleavy’s *The Ginger Man*. This novel helped permanently shape his writing and, to some extent, his lifestyle.
>
> The Ginger Man features some typical Hunter Thompson language like “lousy bastard” and “pervert” and “crazy.”

*The Ginger Man* is important: it throws much light on Thompson's writing. Nonsensical people can use the word *inform*, but that is not the gist. The gist is that *The Ginger Man* made Thompson as much as it made Martin Amis's *Money*. Naturally, there are more books and writers that influenced Thompson - Hemingway, for example - but these are peripheral in comparison with Donleavy's book, at least to myself. I could be wrong.

> Thompson often become obsessed with certain words (“doomed,”“atavistic,” etc.) and in 1958 his preferred word was “myopia” or “myopic.” He included this in many of his letters from that year.

The mention of words that Thompson preferred continues throughout the book. It displays his preference for some words during different times and makes a difference in this book. For many writers, favourite words are repeated, become cliché, and ultimately only fireworks: Thompson was alcoholic and addicted to cocaine, which didn't make things easy, especially when paired with his vicious critique of his editors; even though I feel Thompson was correct in his critique some times, perhaps especially in his political critique toward the end of his life, he burned a lot of bridges, possibly some synaptic function, and, in the end, his own language and reason, which shows in his writing. Wills neatly displays this devolution.

There are quite a few enlightening passages that show how Thompson became his well-known writer self:

> For all he was improving as a writer, he learned at least one bad habit in Florida that would cause him untold trouble in his future career. By the middle of 1957, he was partying instead of watching the games he was meant to cover. Whether out of boredom or a deeper compulsion for self-sabotage, that year he began reporting based upon secondhand reports rather than what he actually saw. When he was asked to write about a banquet for the Eglin NCO newsletter, he got outrageously drunk and missed the event. This made the perfect fodder for his letters, in which the incorrigible mythmaker excelled at placing himself at the center of the story, not as an heroic figure but rather as an amusing loser.

Wills does a good job at uncovering problematic themes in Thompson's writing. For example, was he racist and homophobic?

> As to the question of whether Thompson was in fact racist, Semonin and others have noted that he had been deeply impressed by seeing Thurgood Marshall speak in New York and had broken a major taboo in both northern and southern states by dating a black woman, suggesting that he was more progressive than his literary efforts suggest. The experience with Marshall quite possibly was Thompson’s first major move toward a more progressive attitude to race, and although there are offensive stereotypes and racial slurs used casually in some of his later work, much of his best writing can equally be viewed as firmly antiracist. Thompson occasionally admitted to saying things that were racially insensitive but contended that this did not make him racist. In 1969, he explained: “My prejudice is pretty general, far too broad and sweeping for any racial limitations.” Sandy, meanwhile, stated in the 1990s that his attitudes as of the time of writing The Rum Diary were quite regressive, but that he had long since changed his stance.

> Hunter was never entirely comfortable with the idea of homosexuality, although like his views on race he became increasingly liberal over the course of his life. Still, he often appeared homophobic. After his brother came out to him, Hunter refused to discuss it. When Jim Thompson was dying of AIDS in 1994, it was Sandy—by then a decade and a half divorced from Hunter—who looked after him and begged Hunter to visit.

Wills's record of Thompson's history of not delivering on time and devolving as a writer is quite effervescent.

What pocks my mind is the duality in Wills: he both lambasts and lauds Thompson. This is perhaps not strange when a writer follows their subject in both admiration and style - the later, somewhat - but it makes for a slightly fragmented reading experience.

This book is marred by its start; the introduction and first couple of chapters made me think this could well turn out to be a Wikipedia riff, a patchwork of experience simply culled by the help of Google. Not so. Not always. Some of is, indeed, patchwork. The main saving grace in this book is how Wills pieces together Thompson's latter years, his experiences with other people, and how his writing continued.

One of Wills's boons is displaying how Thompson evolved in his writing.

> After his death, his widow, Anita Thompson, explained: “Here is the secret: Hell's Angels owes its genre-busting success to the previous fifteen years Hunter had spent studying the art and craft of writing.” Indeed, he continued to develop these odd, stylistic quirks that ultimately forged his own inimitable style, making his writing easily identifiable. But it was not just a matter of style. These unconventional transitions helped him to structure his stories, weaving the strands of the plot neatly, and guiding his reader seamlessly from scene to scene, idea to idea. By beginning paragraphs with certain sentence fragments, he was able to include more wisdom through digressions and tangents before bringing the reader suddenly back to the main track. It would become a major feature of his writing over the coming years.

Wills's details on Thompson's *Hells Angels*, his breakthrough book, are important: they clearly lay out Thompson's ability (or inability, depending who is asked) to merge fiction and non-fiction. Wills also lays out the birth of Thompson's alter ego that would act a clear line in his life: Raoul Duke.

> This article features yet more self-mythologizing from Thompson, who was keen to tell his readers that he had almost blown up Richard Nixon by smoking a cigarette too close to the engine of his airplane. He also drops in a name that might have been familiar to readers of Hell’s Angels: Raoul Duke. Thompson again mentions Duke just briefly, this time to deliver a quote about only trusting a drunk used-car salesman. Years later, Thompson said that he used Duke because he wanted an Angel to say something but none of them would say exactly what he needed.

Remember Thompson's three-word sentence: 'Neutrality is obsolete'. It says everything about how style wins over truth, whatever truth is.

There is valuable writing on Thompson's downfall:

> Even the journalists who did like and respect Thompson found his actions in Vietnam baffling at best. Five days after arriving in the country, he suddenly fled to Hong Kong. Newsweek reporter Loren Jenkins, whom Thompson had known since 1963, was disappointed in him. “You’re here to write Fear and Loathing in Saigon,” he said, “not Hong Kong.” Thompson claimed that he needed to sort out the situation with his insurance, but Jenkins felt that he was simply afraid. Years later, in Kingdom of Fear, Thompson wrote that he had gone to Hong Kong to pick up money and drugs for his journalist friends, but this was a lie. He had brought the money with him on his original flight and the opium he spoke of was available just about anywhere in the city, including the hotel’s room service. Indeed, his audio recordings from a Hong Kong hotel room confirm that he left Saigon because “the cycle of panic and calm is so violent” that he could no longer stand it.

At the end of this book, I did not feel it is the product of a dilettante or sloppy writer. I believe it needs some firmer edits, but that can be arranged. We are left with a simple story of a troubled and talented writer who let it all go to shame. Thompson, it seems, wrote himself into becoming a gonzo character and lost the plot. Then again, who needs a plot?