Climb aboard Chuck Kinder's bright red Honda four-wheeler, pull your seat belt tight and hold on for dear life as the bad-boy writer takes a wild ride, revisiting the hills and hollows of his native West Virginia.

		"LAST MOUNTAIN DANCER" By Chuck Kinder Carroll & Graf ($26)

If you can't run with the big dogs or are easily offended by writing with king-sized doses of sex, drugs and hillbilly music, then you'd best stay on the porch.

If you prefer sipping Perrier to swigging moonshine, then Kinder's latest isn't for you.

But adventuresome readers are in for some laugh-out-loud fun as Kinder, who teaches creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, offers a gonzo-style account -- part fact, part fiction, in the best Hunter S. Thompson tradition -- of a sabbatical spent on the back roads of a state he portrays as every bit as strange as the Bermuda Triangle.

Born in Montgomery, Kinder grew up in a succession of Mountain State towns. While at West Virginia University, he entered a creative writing competition and his winning manuscript grew into his first novel, "Snakehunter," published in 1973.

His other novels are "The Silver Ghost" (1978) and "Honeymooners (2001).

Now comes Kinder's "Last Mountain Dancer," a strange book with a beginning and an end but no discernible narrative line in between. Instead, it's all confusing bits and pieces, like a traditional West Virginia patchwork quilt as reimagined by, say, Piccaso.

Famous and no-so famous West Virginians wander through the book, playing their brief moments on the page.

There's Dagmar, the blond bombshell of 1950s television who was the object of Kinder's pre-teen lust.

There's Sid Hatfield, the six-gun hero of the Matewan Massacre.

There's Bernard Coffindaffer, the born-again businessman who paid to erect those wooden crosses found on so many of the state's hillsides.

There's political legend U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd and Point Pleasant's mysterious Mothman. There's Chuck Yeager and Soupy Sales and Don Knotts.

And, of course, there's Jessico White, the "Last Mountain Dancer," a hapless fellow with a bad case of Elvis mania and a genuine talent for the mountain style of dancing known as "clogging."

With Kinder at the wheel, driving like a maniac -- and stopping to take a good spit over the side of the soaring bridge that arches over the New River, more than 800 feet below -- readers are taken on a madcap tour of southern West Virginia, stopping sometimes at places where roadside markers chronicle historic events but, more often, at hillbilly honky-tonks, where the beer is cold and the babes are hot.

From time to time, Kinder briefly forsakes the lure of the road so he can catch up on his writing chores. After all, he is working on a book.

"What's your book about, Chuckie?" his mother asks.

Kinder's reply:

"It is, I told my old momma and did a stiff shot of Dickel straight -- a do-not-go-gently, grumpy, grouchy corny coming-of-old-age story, on one level anyway. It is also a forlorn, tear-jerky, but essentially true and finally foot-stomping country-song-of-myself. I want it to be a big jukebox of a book, sans any fancy, Yankee, outsider sentiments such as irony or understatement."

His mother laughs and says, "Well, that should certainly be a best seller,"

Many readers will laugh right along with Chuckie's mom, for his book, despite all its boozy bluster, is at its heart a lighthearted, affectionate look at a region he obviously loves and wants to capture before it gives way to the bulldozers of "progress."