HUNTER THOMPSON does not put his finger on a mere pressure point of the American dream. He does more. He plunges directly into its central vein and gauges the intensity of the pulse, a manic ebb and flow of raw human yearnings for wealth. Las Vegas is the ultimate embodiment of this process, stripped of genteel pretensions, and it is toward this mecca of the Horatio Alger dream that Thompson heads. He speeds dope-crazed along the desert in a rented convertible, The Great Red Shark, accompanied by his Samoan attorney. Ostensibly he is on assignment for an East Coast sporting magazine to cover the Mint 400, a renowned motorcycle race. But the story is thwarted when the plush and highly sophisticated atmosphere of the race is choked with desert dust, and press coverage becomes as futile as "trying to keep track of a swimming meet in an Olympicsized pool filled with talcum powder instead of water."

With time on his hands, Thompson, alias Raoul Duke, turns self-appointed investigator of the American Dream, as its garish trappings unfold before him in Vegas' nightclubs, casinos, and neonlit car-gorged strips. To assault this scene in a fitting manner, Thompson employs a personal brand of "gonzo journalism," opposed to professional journalism and characterized by the need for "intense, demented involvement" with the subject. Although it requires a much greater degree of personal involvement, gonzo journalism is akin to Tom Wolfe's style of reporting -- which evolved in one instance into "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" after Wolfe hightailed around the West following Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.

In Thompson's career, he shifted to this style in the middle sixties when prompted to cover the activities of the Hell's Angels in California. He sought an antidote to the sensationalism and misrepresentation they were receiving at the hands of the press. While maintaining a reporter's role, he rode with the motorcycle gang, getting full exposure to the broken home life, intense love of fast choppers, wild orgies and drunken brawls, even suffering a brutal stomping at the end of his relationship with them. Although the means tended toward violence, the end result of this gonzo journalistic venture was a full and objective portrayal of the life style that Thompson compiled in "Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs."

APPLIED TO THE SCENE at Las Vegas, gonzo journalism yields no explicit moral evaluations. It gives, rather, a detailed description of the desperate mood and frantic action epitomized by crowds surrounding the crap tables, "still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last-minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino."

The action centers around the wild binges of Duke and his attorney as they respond in their own way to Vegas' call for a "gross physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country." Far from accomodating their lifestyle to that of the straight world, they intensify it. They spend several days completely twisted on dope, booze, and lack of sleep, and find this state of mind matches that of the gambling loonies who hang out at the Circus-Circus along with the Forty Flying Carazito Brothers, flaming gorilla, and Six Nymphet Sisters from San Diego. In fact, nobody notices how twisted they are, for in Vegas, one can pursue his own dream, no matter how savage -- just as long as one doesn't "burn the locals." And the doped-up duo's antics reach outrageous limits. They terrorize the strip in the Great Red Shark; they successfully infiltrate a National District Attorneys' Drug Conference; burn two hotels by charging exorbitant amounts on phony credit cards, intimidate room service girls into loading their room with grapefruit and 600 bars of Neutrogena soap; trace down directions to the American Dream to a grassy plot of land where a sleazy nightclub once stood; and encounter such characters as Savage Lucy, Lacerda the menacing Portuguese photographer, and the Vincent Black Shadow.

Most of the episodes are pure fantasy, but Thompson's first person account -- a combination of fastpaced action, immediate detail and extended dialogue -- lends them an air of realism or at least exaggerated fact. The element of fantasy gives an excuse to succumb to the book's outrageous humor, but the underlying mood is one of paranoia and repulsion. That is namely Thompson's "fear and loathing" of a Dream that mesmerizes people so completely, as they gorge their egos with dollars, that they are blind to social responsibility.

NOT RESTRICTED by social pressure, the "savage journey" accelerates downward, focussing Duke's attentions on a degraded physical level. Eating, drinking, and fouling like the rest, he somehow manages to retain a shred of self-respect. It alienates him from them, and causes repulsive hallucinations of lizards, moray eels, and huge reptiles standing in blood-soaked carpets sipping cocktails. The drive for success/money/power has created a world where an "eat the wounded" shark ethic prevails, but Thompson believes its apocalypse is imminent. He watches people burn themselves out in struggles for self-preservation, escaping "meat-hook reality" through dope, booze, and watching football -- "whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time."

This assessment of the American condition reappears in Thompson's more recent writing his articles on the Republican and Democratic Conventions in Miami and on pro-football for Rolling Stone. These are more satisfying and pertinent than "Fear and Loathing" because they contend with bastions of the American Dream that will remain until Thompson's predicted collapse of evil forces. Thompson retains his gonzo journalistic stance but tempers it with political analysis. He acknowledges implicitly that one can deal with present reality, however twisted it appears. As brilliant and funny as it is, "Fear and Loathing" requires nothing but hysterical laughter and self-indulgence while biding time before the apocalypse. And as Thompson admits, "As true gonzo journalism, this doesn't really make it -- and even if it did, I couldn't possibly admit it. Only a goddam lunatic would write a thing like this and then claim it was all true."