Hasford keeps faith with the truth, however ugly, as a means of salvation. Hasford has truly outdone himself here. The Phantom Blooper is a visionary's work of impressive literary art. An extraordinary book, a descent into hell in more ways than one. We hump through a defoliated rain forest that is too dead even to smell dead.
Ancient trees stand stark and black and stripped of leaves.
The black trees are hung with limp windblown flowers that are parachutes from illumination shells. Later we see trees that are as white as bone, sun-bleached skeletons of the great hardwoods, white trees with black leaves. The trunks and branches of the trees are warped by unnatural cancerous growths that look like human faces and human hands and human fingers growing out of decaying wood. In the poisonous fields of the defoliated rain forest we see monsters, freaks, and mutants. We see a water rat with two heads and as big as a dog, birds with extra feet coming out of their backs, Siamese-twin bullfrogs joined at the stomach.