Hunter S. Thompson rented a property in Woody Creek, Colo., in January of 1968 and began closing the door on the world. He had written the excellent “Hell’s Angels” – a fantastic, participatory romp that would alone have established and maintained his reputation – and with money from it, he started buying the Woody Creek property that became the fortified compound now regularly referred to by journalists like me.

Fortified compound: It’s a piece of Thompsonian humor, for sure, but poignant. It may be that the only fortification out there at Owl Farm consists of those crazy metal vulture sculptures at the gate and a few noisy peacocks, but the message remains. You don’t “fortify” something, or advertise it as such, if you welcome visitors.

Mr. Thompson estranged himself a long time ago, and he remained an outsider for something like 33 years. His new book (Simon & Schuster, 222 pages, $23), a collection of his writing from “Page 2” ofESPN.com, is an astonishing document of the collision of the outside world with his three decade monologue of depravity, fear, and catastrophe.

Thompson is allegedly writing a sports column. It would be more accurate to describe what he writes for ESPN as an incredibly tangential diary of his gambling. “Betting against the Lakers in the NBA playoffs has never been a sound investment,” begins one piece, and within 35 words of that one gets:

more internal bitching & squabbling and crazed jealous treachery than in a tribe of Hyenas in heat … It may be worth noting here that Hyenas are the only beasts in nature that are born physically bisexual & remain that way all their lives. They are also cannibals that routinely eat their young & everything else that looks helpless. People who know Hyenas describe them as “the filthiest animal in nature – with the possible exception of English cows & corrupt big-city police officers in 21stcentury America.

Nothing shocking there, just the good Doctor cracking himself up. It’s his old insane imagination, his vicious vision of America:

Derby week in Louisville is a white-knuckle orgy of Booze & Sex & Violence that 99 times out of 100, swamps any body who gets near it in a hurricane of Fear, Pain, & Stupefying Disasters that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. … I went to one Derby party where two teenage girls were deliberately set on fire & tortured by drunken rich people, who then hurled their bodies off a cliff above the Ohio River & laughed about it later.

There is an entry dated September 10, 2001, and an entry dated September 12, 2001.They split the book in half. Or seem to.

In April 2001, Mr. Thompson is discussing the rumored (and as always with him, one wonders by whom it was rumored) demise of the NBA and muses: “Any geek with a cheap computer can log on to the World Wide Web and spread terrifying rumors about Anthrax Bombs exploding in Dallas or half the population of San Francisco being killed in three days.” Mr. Thompson was worried about anthrax bombs in April – he was ahead of the curve.

The degree to which Mr. Thompson by this point had separated himself from the world is evident in the details of his writing. There are phone calls from outside: Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, old friends, writers. There is television. There is a small cast of characters who roll through Owl Creek (including the fabulous Anita, whom Thompson has married, and with whom he has comically clear-headed, unambiguous conversations).

The rest was in his head, and his head was a horror show. He has always believed that world is insane. He has always implied, at times accused, that those in charge (of anything) are drunk on their own power, rotten with smugness, utterly venal. He has always believed the worst possible, and the American dream dead. The headline for Part Two of “Hey Rube” reads: Where were you when the fun stopped? Fear and Loathing in America: Beginning of the End … Even ESPN was Broadcasting War News.”

I know a woman who was faced with the bizarre challenge of managing a day-care program for the mentally ill on September 12, 2001. Many of the folks there had spent the majority of their lives believing that the world was coming to an end. And now, she explained to me, she had to tell them that they were sort of right. Yes, buildings are falling down. Yes, the city is full of a horrible, gruesome fear.

That’s what it must have felt like to be Hunter S. Thompson that day. It was as if the world had caught up with him.

The last time the world caught up with Hunter S. Thompson was in 1968, at the Democratic convention in Chicago. It pushed him over the edge. He was astonished and horrified. He invented Raoul Duke there, in Chicago, and met him for a midnight drink: “The desperate scene outside seemed light-years away; only the plywood windows reminded those of us inside that the American Dream was clubbing itself to death just a few feet away. Duke was sitting with Susan at a table across from the bar.”

In 1969,Hunter S. Thompson wrote to Jim Silberman of Random House that he found himself “slipping more and more into the role of my pseudonymonous (?) foil, Raoul Duke, who no longer understands what his journalism is all about.” He hid out with Duke for 33 years. Then he got what should have been a gravy assignment – he probably billed ESPN for his gambling expenses – and the world chased him down.

This collection is too long. At times it is reminiscent of that passage in “Generation of Swine” in which Mr. Thompson gave odds on what seemed like (and may very well have been) every single candidate for the House of Representatives. Not exactly a page-turner, in other words. But a few moments in it shine, and you can’t help but be glad that when it all hit the fan, Hunter S. Thompson was working the Sports Desk.