TRAVELIN THIS countryside, there is no electricity and no phone services. There is no law and the police's main function appears to be to take bribes and turn a blind eye to the drug trafficking trade. Murder is not a shock - it is inevitable.
And the US border is just 20 miles away.
This is the Sierra Madre, a 900-mile mountain range in northern Mexico that broods over the rest of the country. It is home to killers, drug dealers and nomads. Life in the Sierra Madre makes a Robert Rodriguez film look like a documentary, but for Richard Grant, much like Charles Bowden and JPS Brown before him, its lure proves irresistible.
Grant planned to travel the length of the range to write this book, and his trip provides some extraordinary tales, some of which are not steeped in blood. The Tarahumaran Indians, for example, enjoy two things - drinking tesguino, a fermented corn beer, and long-distance running. Sociologist John G Kennedy calculated that the average adult Tarahumara has 60 to 90 binge drinking sessions a year, lasting between 10 and 36 hours.
This appears not to affect their running skills. Grant went with a team of seven Tarahumarans to a 100-mile ultramarathon in Colorado. They cut running sandals from tires found in a dump, smoked incessantly and refused to train. All seven finished in the top 11, drinking copious beers en route, and the winner, Juan Herrera, was 25 minutes inside the course record.
Then there is Ruben Ruiz, a stone-cold killer of a cowboy. He had fought gun battles with police, army and other mafiosos, and had a reputation as a murderer and drug dealer. Yet he would routinely appear, looking "strange on the range", in a frilly dress, smeared mascara and with rouged, if stubbly, cheeks.
Grant seems to be chasing more than the dream of exploring the Sierra Madre, and at one stage he embarks on a search for an outlaw's buried treasure. The romance of his approach to the journey as a whole, however, is swiftly eroded by the darkness and violence all around him. As he makes his way from one narco-run town to another, his roadtrip becomes a hellish ordeal where death is usually riding shotgun in his battered pick-up truck.
He is hunted in the dark by men high on cocaine and bloodlust. He shares shots of tequila with others in bars, friendship merely a facade as they delicately do the conversational dance of camaraderie that Grant knows could end in him being shot. In this country, Grant is told, strangers are murdered by locals purely "to please the trigger finger".
The culture of Mexican machismo slowly turns into the author's bête noire, and he puts it at the root of Mexico's evils. Narcos on the make typically drive brand new luxury pick-up trucks and sport glinting AK-47s but their homes are little more than hovels and their families go hungry. In the Sierra Madre, the horrific practice of rapto is still commonplace, where a man kidnaps a girl and forces her to marry him - "Raping an under- age girl is not against the law in many Mexican states, if the rapist marries her".
During one stop, Grant is asked if he would like to buy some marijuana, cocaine or rocket-propelled grenades - the vendors tell him they are good for bringing down helicopters. When Grant says he is worried about the police, the two break into smiles. "There is no problem," they reassure him, "my brother is a police officer and we are training to be police officers."
This is a bloody, chaotic and at times brilliant brawl of a book. Grant is a gifted travel writer, and he does his best to capture the intense brew of madness that seems endemic to the area's society, a volatile mix of feuds, drug and alcohol abuse, and idle slaughter that dominates this Mexican hinterland.
After visiting the country, the French Surrealist Andre Breton said: "Our art movement is not needed in this country." It seems it is quite mad enough by itself.
• Laurence Mackin is a freelance journalist