Already Dead: A California Gothic

by Denis Johnson

A contemporary noir, Already Dead is the tangled story of Nelson Fairchild Jr., disenfranchised scion to a northern California land fortune. A relentless failure, Nelson has botched nearly every scheme he's attempted to pull off. Now his future lies in a potentially profitable marijuana patch hidden in the lush old-growth redwoods on the family land.

Nelson has some serious problems. His marriage has fallen apart, and he may lose his land, cash and crop in the divorce. What's more, in need of some quick cash, he had foolishly agreed to smuggle $90,000 worth of cocaine through customs for Harry Lally, a major player in a drug syndicate. Chickening out just before bringing the drugs through, he flushed the powder. Now Lally wants him dead, and two goons are hot on his trail. Desperate, terrified and alone, for Nelson, there may be only one way out.

This is Denis Johnson's biggest and most complex book to date, and it perfectly showcases his signature themes of fate, redemption and the unraveling of the fabric of today's society. Already Dead, with its masterful narrative of overlapping and entwined stories, will further fuel the acclaim that surrounds one of today's most fascinating writers.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Novels, Literature, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Thriller

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Poet, playwright and author Denis Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany, in 1949 and was raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington. He earned a masters' degree from the University of Iowa and received many awards for his work, including a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction (1993), a Whiting Writer's Award (1986), the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review for Train Dreams, and most recently, the National Book Award for Fiction (2007).

Reviews

[Jayakrishnan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book of place set in and around the small town of Gualala, Mendocino County, Northern California. A sprawling crime noir with many characters and sub-plots. A paranormal thriller in which the devil takes over the body of people who are about to die. Already Dead is a lot of things. It only really works as a book of place. Johnson's descriptions of the small American towns, valleys, hills, flora and fauna and many psychos and weirdos who inhabit these towns make you wish you lived in some of these places. It is almost as if these small American towns contain some kind of hope and magic for all these lost criminal minded characters. The book's firsT page:

Van Ness felt a gladness and wonder as he drove past the small isolated towns along U.S. 101 in Northern California, a certain interest, a yearning, because he sensed they were places a person could disappear into. They felt like little naps you might never wake up from—you might throw a tire and hike to a gas station and stumble unexpectedly onto the rest of your life, the people who would finally mean something to you, a woman, an immortal friend, a saving fellowship in the religion of some obscure church. But such a thing as a small detour into deep and permanent changes, at the time, anyway, that he was travelling down the coast from Seattle into Mendocino County, wasn’t even to be dreamt of in Van Ness’s world.

Well, it does not work out for Van Ness when a girl he gives a lift to accuses him of sexual harassment when a police officer stops the car for speeding.

It reminded me of Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance which was set in Provincetown and the small town has a magic of its own and influences the character's actions.

Already Dead is too rambling to work as a crime thriller. There is no real action or suspense after a certain point in the novel.

The paranormal parts of the book were indecipherable to me. The devil or paranormal entities taking charge of people who are already lost is an interesting idea. Here it just seemed added on without any real inspiration. The Yvonne character is barely developed.

The plot is interesting. Nelson Fairchild is growing marijuana in a remote patch with his friend Clarence Meadows. He hopes to make a lot of money after harvesting the crop. But he has two big problems. Two men working for Harry Lally to whom Nelson owes a large sum of money because he messed up a drug operation, are trying to kill Nelson. Nelson hopes to pay off Lally using his inheritance. But in his will, Nelson's fiercely Roman Catholic father has named Nelson's wife Winona as beneficiary of all his prime coastal property. This is to keep his son in line. Nelson Sr is seething and revengeful after his wife left him and is against the legal dissolution of marriage. His will is a ploy to keep Nelson Jr from divorcing.

Other characters include - Yvonne - a witch/sorceress who holds seances. Officer Navarro - a cop who reads letters from Bill Fairchild saying that CIA is trying to mess with the minds of residents. Navarro is always in the periphery of the sinister criminal activities in Gualala. He has an affair with a waitress called Mo.

The messed up Fairchild family with the criminal drug trafficker and producer Nelson Fairchild, the reclusive and batshit crazy Bill Fairchild who sends weird letters to the police about CIA activity in the hills and their domineering father reminded me of the Stamper family in Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion.

Nelson Fairchild is an interesting character whose relevance gets buried with all the boring sub-plots:

I sit out here and think convulsively until I’m numbed by dope and confused by my own brain—think about my business woes, my wife, my mistress, my region and my region’s demands and allowances. My idiot brother. My ugly father. Free will? Personal decisions? It’s not that simple, not at all. What am I but the knot, the gnarled dark intersection, of all these strands? They keep me from acting, and they tug at me to act. Stand fast, and I’ll be torn. But if I want to move, then all of these things must break, they all have to be ripped apart, and that’s the end of me just as much as the end of them.

I had an inkling about what was going on until around 300 pages. It was tough going after that. A lot of it was indecipherable.

The book is downright sleazy at times.

Frankheimer rose up, covered his exquisite body with a ragged robe of brown cloth, headed toward the dining room, shutting behind him the door to the study and closing the robe’s folds over the arc of his sesquipedalian dick. Now they were linked, Fairchild and this giant, Melissa the author of this union and in some sense its offspring. Now in this woman they were mixed. Fairchild had known him as a plumbing contractor, the kind you’re sorry you hired, who sometimes had to be rousted out of this very house, where he sat surrounded by his weird books and theories, the kyrie eleison on his stereo, the cocaine and the channeling, the people inside his walls. Now they were married.

Maybe it is my fault. It is not an easy book to read. Parts of the book are epistolary with the letters Bill Fairchild writes to the police, interrupting the main plot. Johnson also jumps back and forth between events. It confused the hell out of me. The narrative switches between first and third person and sometimes I did not know which character was doing the talking. Even the dialogs were random at times. Some of the sub-plot choices featuring Inspector Navarro and Clarence Meadows (Nelson's partner in crime) were downright dull. Frankly, I really enjoyed large portions of the novel. But after a point, I did not know what the hell was going on. But I finished it anyway.

Already Dead is testament to the fact that a writer can do whatever the fuck he wants with his novel. A film director or a music composer would not be this daring. But this is exactly why I keep editing my review. The writer has worked so hard on the novel. I read Angels and loved it. So I keep reading passages from the book. It is an interesting artifact. It is like an alien I want to be friends with because I liked a large portion of it. Nobody can meander and go deeper than the writer.

Already Dead is a book which I could not get a grip over. I really wanted to. I loved most of the first 300 pages. I loved the descriptions of the place. Who cares about the characters as long as they are free enough or crazy enough to do whatever it is they wanted to do? If I may say so, none of the characters were properly developed.

The long scene with the two assassins' of Nelson Fairchild inside the Buddhist monastery wasn't funny or engaging. Nelson's slow death with him meeting all the spirits of his father and the woman and the two hunters ..... what am I supposed to think about that?

Already Dead is like one of those sprawling three hour 70s movies made by pompous filmmakers who harbored a tendency towards excess.

Denis Johnson is a writer whom I want to access or be friends with. But Already Dead does not make us good friends. Though I did order another book by him. I like him enough to read all his books.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clear, dense, lyrical, convoluted as The Big Sleep, a tale of intersecting fates and levels of reality on the Mendocino Coast of California. Fairchild, the grower of pot, son of a real Steinbeckian/Keseyish owner of 10,000 acres of uncut redwood, is the cause and center of the disaster which swirls out from his clever, overheated, lying, imaginative, cowardly, self-justifying self--an inevitable screwup over a drug deal.

What a cast and crew--Fairchild's schizophrenic brother, living in the redwoods where he's trying literally to avoid the radar emitting from large domes in the hills. His soon to be ex-wife, Winona, to whom the father has deeded all Fairchild's inheritance, to keep the marriage together. His little hippie mistress, Melissa, who is sleeping with everyone and has no idea how obsessed Fairchild is with her. Frankenheimer, surfer, paranoid, whom Melissa is obsessed with. Clarence Meadows, Fairchild's partner in the pot plantation. Etcetera. Mix in a witch and a cop from LA and hired killers and ministers of various stripes and soul thieves, a good heaping handful of the lingering Sixties, mix it up and pour it out among the redwoods on the world's most spectacular stretch of coastline, and you have Johnson's 'Already Dead.'

Is it a mess? Probably. Is it a splendid mess? Absolutely. A Pyncheonesque outpouring of invention? Sure. However, it was Robert Stone who kept coming most to mind as I read. The book is very like a gorgeous, perilous, violent, self-justifying, Sixties-inflected Stone. The care taken in every sentence takes this book off the map into the region of pure untrammeled beauty. The richness of observation has all the earmarks of love-- for what do we see this deeply but the object of love? These deeply understood characters in all their dangerous quirks. I loved the unapologetic use of dreams and madness. That the news and newspapers figure in the book, that everyone reads and has had his or her worldview shaped by literature.

Here's a random example of Johnson's descriptive firepower. Here's Fairchild's point of view: "Vagueness came up over the ridge in billows. I'd had PG&E put a street lamp at the head of the driveway, it cost less than seven dollars a month, and they took care of the thing. Its glow a quarter-mile off seemed unattainable, seemed imaginary. A large creature, an owl probably, in this atmosphere it looked white, swept up from under the edge of the hill behind me and passed directly over my head. I could hear its wingstrokes like desperate breaths. I followed around to the front of the house and watched it moving off toward the front gate and the streetlight, where its shadow opened out from behind it like a tunnel through the lamp-lit fog.The tunnel closed to nothing as the bird passed over the source, and now there was only the iridescent mist. Everything looked so much like a science-ficion comic book it hardly seemed possible to be inside it and not to be able to turn a page..."

Here's Clarence Meadows, a decorated Iraqi war vet, thinking about the action which won him his scars: "But the dream had all the feelings, slowed down as if for savoring--or maybe they savored him--that during the actual events had been smeared sideways by motion and soaked in a wondrous deafness. Clarence dreamed of driving in the open jeep across Beirut with the sunrise burning over his shoulder. He didn't know what they were heading for but they were heading straight toward it. This was a general scramble of hysterical proportions, anyway, some brief, giant thing had torn into the day like a can opener..."

It's a very masculine book--there are wonderful women characters, but the point of view characters are all men--another aspect which heightens the Stone-ishness of it. And I enjoyed seeing the various viewpoints of men as they considered the women and their relationships to them--with great acuity.

One of my favorite parts concerned the central character, Fairchild, considering that his whole life has been built on lies. What a remarkable understanding of human weakness, the way each action has its repercussions, definitely the Karmic central theme of the book:

"Maneuvering through my lies was like hopping faster than the eye would follow from branch to branch across the roof of a jungle, a jungle cultivated to cover up earlier lies, the whole business lacing back delicately to find its mother-root in my first lie, completely forgotten now, and never to be discovered by anybody else, the lie to cover my first little crime, also forgotten--no, I swear I didn't take the cookies--or more probably, a whole childhood fashioned to avoid the question of the cookies in the first place, my every move, to this day, warped around the absence of getting caught, the void where there should have been my arrest and trial and punishment: a new route to school planned in order to avoid the boy who owned the stolen cookies, and a reason invented to explain the new route to whoever might ask, and evidence concocted to demonstrate that the reason isn't a lie--I need the exercise, I'm going out for track and field--and then a career of track-and-field events and long practice in a sport that doesn't interest me, and a new personality shaped, a false persona who thrives on track and field, who loves running (But I do love running. Don't I? Or why else pend so much time doing it?) and hurdling over the intricacies of his falsehoods toward this day, Tuesday, September 4, when I'm ready to commit murder to deal with my mistakes without actually correcting them because... because I don't want to correct them. I can't survive the correcting of them. I just want them erased."

I'll stop quoting but the book is covered with underlines and check marks and notes in the margins.

It has some of the problems that a book told through multiple points of view often have--in dividing the readers' loyalty out among so many characters, it's hard to pull together a fully satisfying ending--though Johnson does his damnedest.

Friends were surprised to hear that this was my first Denis Johnson--I guess people normally start with Jesus' Son. The new 'Train Dreams' is also a big hit. I happen to love Northern California, so I started here, and don't regret it. Johnson fans--Which should I read next? Jesus' Son or Train Dreams?

[Szplug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Johnson writes like a dream, one Dantean page after another. As was the case with its younger sibling, Tree of Smoke , this is a flawed work of genius—and you daren't even skim the lengthier metaphysical soliloquies, episodes in finger-drumming vexation though they occasionally descend to be, simply because DJ threads them with phrases of such arresting form and subliminal profundity as to leave your eyes stickily aswim and seated-self shaking, whilst weaving them so dexterously into the logorrheic torrent that they threaten to evanesce if sequestered or pried out of sequence. But the book's genius smoothes any bumps in the road—and the crew of this Northern Californian existential inferno, lost and damaged amidst an oceanic New Age all druggy and infelicitous, are fantastically wrought. And does there exist a writer whose marescape fictive realms are more saturated with a spontaneous sexuality—alight in every conceivable situation—but whose rendering of the act is more passionless, more alienating, more a grotesquely enlarged spotlight upon ass pimples and scummy lips, frightened eyes and filthy fingernails; one which, through frenetic union, serves merely to heighten the panoramic desperation and choking loneliness that fuels that very desire? The giddy energy of happy hippiedom and suntastic shamanism has wasted away, burnt off in pallid couplings and swatch-book spending; and what remains ripples listlessly in the breezes betwixt ancient redwoods—sometimes cartoonish, and sometimes feral. Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in (Dead) Space, spiritualized, melodic matrices contracting and expanding, darkness teased forth and set running with the hunters not far behind, surfacing from dream into reality or plunging from life into dream, perhaps both, in succession or simultaneously, with violence the glottal stop that brings everything to a momentary, crashing halt. It's all kinda grim, mountingly tense and temporally elastic, sadder than a spilled cone, peppered with ecstasies, and a shoreside roller coaster of (black) humour, running the gauntlet from wryly-wrung smiles to full-on laughter at the level of DFW or Thomas P or, dare I say it, even T-Burn his-own-dour-self.

*************** SPOILERS IN THE FOLLOWING *************

I've been mulling over this latest read by Johnson since finishing it last Tuesday; and notwithstanding that its pointed insights and character failures worked mightily in tandem with that dissociative engine ignited anew within me in leaving me feeling like I was falling to pieces, become that corporeally-challenged shade whose rote routines have been scripted into washed out, plangent theatre—where past and future avenues of life, inside and out, are pressed into oblique angles which cast every perspective in a puzzlingly unreal and hope-leaching hue—an eerie sensation that plagues me jedes jetzt und dann; well, I'm left assembling that which disappointed and fell short more than the episodes—and there were plenty of 'em—that grooved me right down to the bone. Frankly, Johnson fumbled the ball with Already Dead, because early on all was aligned for a five-star masterpiece. Alas, as another reviewer took note of, it is the female characters who are possessed of the most pungent potentialities, and, ultimately, they were, to a one, unrealized and/or abandoned by the author in lieu of focussing upon the more vaingloriously chaotic and spiritually ravaged and lushly verbose—and, in the end, less interesting—men. In particular, Nelson Fairchild, Jr., who eventually began to wear on my nerves something fierce. John Navarro and Clarence Meadows were well handled, while Radar Bill and Frankenstein were both furnished to provide true revelations; but, inexplicably, the latter and Van Ness became subordinated in authorial attentiveness. To a lesser degree, the same curious choices infected Tree of Smoke and held me back from loving it unconditionally.

What's more, I am becoming more and more convinced that this story would have worked better with the demonic element either hinted at but downplayed, or else embraced fully and brought right into the mainstream of the narrative exposition. As it is, Johnson opted for half-measures: infusing Already Dead with a rich spiritual element but only teasing with the details, clouding the linkage between characters, floating soap bubbles around the witch, Yvonne, and her conversing ability with the spectral world. IMO, this means that the demonic walk-ins and lattices of fate ultimately detract from the story's coherence: it would have made the novel stronger—if less interesting—to allow this collection of human failure their own part in hobbling their lives, rather than excusing them by introducing opportunistic predators from an already-terminated existence—unless their introduction was more intelligibly connected to the Nietzschean philosophy and oceanside mythologies being used as fictive fuel. And an event I was highly anticipating—the showdown between Clarence and the two hilariously addled and quirkily philosophical gunmen, Falls and Thompson—was stretched out into that bizarre chain of absurdity outside of the Buddhist temple. I was so fucking peeved at how Johnson was thinning out this material so utterly ripe to be one of the most kick-ass sequences in the novel and a wickedly apt pre-climax to the unveiling of what happened to Nelson—although it must be said that I couldn't help but chuckle at the bearded duo's dope-driven banter and dick-tickling display of newfound swagger.

Finally, the novel was too long. Complaints about an author needing to clip their work, particularly in the genre of fiction, can reek of arrogance and ignorance—more often than not, reflecting simply impatience with having to spend irreplaceable reading time on a story whose gist one deems to have measured to a sufficient degree—and, with that always forefront in my mind, I don't often hoe that row. However, it truly applies in the case of Already Dead, of which the final seventy pages contains somewhere in the neighborhood of a four-to-one ratio of padding to substance. Johnson is such a talented writer that I can certainly understand how difficult it might prove to attempt to stem the tide of words and images flooding his mental story-assembler; but it's a shame that he couldn't exert a greater discipline therein, for the indulgent verbosity robs this otherwise spiritually-layered and complexly-structured novel of a major portion of its narrative power heading into that final stretch and utterly etiolates the climax. By the time Nelson Fairchild Jr. finally expires (or at least as embodied in our configuration of space-time) amidst the shoreside redwoods of Northern California's Lost Coast only the most patient of readers will not be overcome with relief. The writing itself is never less than superb, inspired, an absolute aesthetic pleasure—but with all of that said, and the fours stars notwithstanding, I am coming around to the point of frustration with certain author's proclivities for marring their own creations by means of an inattentiveness to what, IMO, constitutes the basics. I'll still read any book by Johnson I come across, beginning with Train Dreams, and as the latter is but a mere 116 pages, I'm excited to discover how he performs in a much more delimited textual environment. Still, Already Dead, its considerable pleasures and successes aside, left me reflecting more upon the negatives than the positives, the missed opportunities over the brilliant realizations, and that's something I find regrettable.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

He was the check-out clerk who always had something to say. Not in an annoying way; not like, just because he worked in a used book store, that made him some kind of expert. Rather, that there was a better than average chance that your purchase could give him a moment's joy. So, he didn't just zap the stuck-on bar code. He held the book. Bit by bit, his face broke into a wry smile. "'A California Gothic'"?

He set this book in California, specifically with an opening scene driving on U.S. 101 in Mendocino County, but also with cultural hues like a 'time-chasm', 'karmic aether' and 'the fire-breath of her astral shelf'. A fog of cynicism, a smoke, from having one foot still in Vietnam, will not lift. We are lost. . .we are scrotally alone in the universe. There is death, but, more so, dying. The act and art of dying. He 'dates' the chapters by separate days or by a handful of days, all between August and October, 1991. Yet, even in those few months, the days crisscross, like 'Pulp Fiction', a character we know to be dead, returned to die again. Already dead. So, yes, a California Gothic.

He uses constantly shifting points of view, almost always a third-person observation with a hint of omniscience. The third-person is invariably one of the handful of main male characters, the female characters having roles which allow the male characters to react or which serve to perpetuate a stereotype (a Wyccan priestess; a born-again; a Black Widow). This allows him to open virtually every chapter with a a few paragraphs of HE, challenging the reader to identify which of the guys is wandering in the fog. In a few chapters, he failed to figure out which he he was writing about.

He is not unintelligent, some say, but he can be an asshole, others believe.

One of the main characters is a cop, flawed, but with a capacity for understanding.

It wasn't the badge's fault. The badge caused nothing. It didn't give you the disease, it only warned the others that you had it.

Modern movements might nod knowingly, in unison; might bookmark it for later usage. But that's not what this was about. This was neither chant not rant. It was a Blues. Of souls lost in a certain time and a certain place. California Purples.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKzg...

[Abel]

Denis Johnson is my all-time favorite author yet I still had to dnf this one with a scant 100 pages to go. His writing is unparalleled, daring to go places others would write off as inappropriate, such as deep unabashed spirituality and the deliberate use of "weak" writing, Strunk and White's abhorred passive voice, so the fault is mine, due in part attention deficit and the urge get back to more slaughtery, gory, and less artful literature. Apologies, sir.

[Carla Remy]

06/2011

I really, really tried so hard. Read hundreds of pages. I don't dispute that Johnson is a great writer. I am the problem: I read genre books not serious literature. I kept finding myself thinking: why are you using so many words, Denis Johnson? Do you really need a page to describe that feeling? Nothing was grabbing me, despite being about crazy Californians and pot growing. Hey, nothing can please everyone and I'm the ultimate lightweight.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess when a little fly zooms through a window it might be thinking “whee, a great big room to explore, could be some wonderful rotted fruit or a discarded biscuit behind the sofa” and then SPLAT, it runs right into an angry man with a towel.


In this analogy I was – ah I see you guessed. And Denis Johnson was – ah, you guessed that too.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am in the middle of a project to read all of Denis Johnson’s novels and poetry in publication order. A lot of these are re-reads, but in this case this was my first reading.

At the front of this book, Johnson makes it clear that the plot is not his own but that of a poet called Bill Knott. He explains this further in his acknowledgements where he names the poem. This naming came a bit late for me because I’d already been intrigued by the introductory note and done some internet research to find the poem. It is “Poem Noir” and here is a link to it: http://robotwisdom2.blogspot.com/2007....

I decided to include a link rather than the text of the poem because, clearly, the poem itself would represent a significant spoiler. You can read it if you are interested and not worried about spoilers. Or after you have read the book.

I decided, and you may not agree with this decision, to read the poem before I read the book. And, truth be told, I have a feeling that was a good decision for my personal experience of the book (although obviously I have no way to prove this). The reason I say this is that knowing the basic plot allowed me to do two things. Firstly, it let me concentrate on the writing, and the writing is the star here: Johnson began his writing as a poet and that is evident in all his novels. Secondly, this novel reads a lot like a dream and isn’t always the easiest to follow: knowing the underlying structure kept me oriented. If you prefer not knowing what will happen in a book, save the poem until afterwards.

Writing at oysterboyreview.org, Steve Kistulentz says the following which sort of summarises my reaction to the book:

Early in the book, a minor character describes the words of the English language as being like prisms. "Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows." And the book's interwoven narratives are often interrupted by the text of obsessive, feverish letters written to various law enforcement agencies by Fairchild, and his insane brother. It is the beauty of Johnson's language, especially in these epistles, that evokes the language of religious ritual. The overtone of menace, the Gulf War in the distance, Already Dead deliberately conjures the specter of St. John on Patmos, and the dream-riddled composition of the Book of Revelation. Like his characters gathering to channel messages from the spirit world, Johnson writes as if he himself was possessed with an otherworldly gift. Already Dead may not be a breakthrough success; its subject matter and the intensity of its language and its violence will undoubtedly, and unfairly, limit his audience. But it should remind us to be grateful whenever a writer with Johnson's gifts chooses to take huge, and ultimately worthwhile, risks.

The basic plot is straightforward and you can read the poem if you just want to know that. What matters more here in terms of reading experience is Johnson’s prose and his social criticism. This book followed the more well-known “Jesus Son” but also came just after the release of Johnson’s collected poetry in “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation’s Millennium General Assembly”. The poetry in the language is often very beautiful and, for me, often more poetic than his poetry (perhaps because of the images he evokes which sit in the context of the novel, but I don’t know). Regarding social criticism, the reviewer I have already quoted gives high praise to Johnson earlier in his review:

The author's insight regarding American society stands equal to the social criticisms of some of the better central European novelists. With writers like Kis, Kundera, and Robert Musil, Johnson seems to share the notion that any individual choice is also political choice; the narrative time frame of the novel parallels the buildup of tensions in the Persian Gulf in the early 1990s. But Johnson's focus on certain fringe groups in today's society makes him peculiarly American, as much a chronicler of this dark age as Twain or Dos Passos were of previous generations.

This book is funny, violent, poetic, and observant. It is not the easiest book to read with its dreamlike prose and regular interruptions from the letters of a mad man. But it is one of those books where you can revel in the language and let the rest wash over you - it is best to let the impressions grow rather than worry about the detail, I think.

Slightly inaccessible but very impressive.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

After the potency of Jesus' Son, Fiskadoro, and Angels this is soft-bellied and slack, and only the wild characters kept it interesting. But literature has to be more than just wild characters with wild stories, in the end it's the writing itself that matters, and this struck me as the product of a racing pencil and a lazy eraser.

I'm not sure I'll even attempt the similarly thick Tree of Smoke after this bloated stoner of a novel.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

The master of the iconoclast...Johnson sheds California's darker underbelly in way I'm only beginning to understand having lived here for just over five years now. Perhaps one of the few contemporary fiction writers who can present addled characters amidst drug-induced euphoria without overt or gimmicky counterculture tones. I'd love to see him explore the long form again in his career.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been obsessing over Denis Johnson this month. He has yet to disappoint me. Of all his work that I've read, though, "Already Dead" is the one that made the largest impact on me. It is one of those novels that you pick up and can not put down. The kind of book you feign illness and cancel plans with friends to stay in and read. Some of the mystical/spiritual aspects are a little hippy-dippy, but I didn't mind for once as it was in keeping with the Southern California feel of the book. Johnson never shies from tragedy and is a master of depicting lost souls, but this book takes his writing to a new plane. The prose is painfully, brutally beautiful and the issues he's dealing with here -- death, conscience, redemption -- are explored in a much more profound and honest way than most contemporary authors are capable of. Highly recommended.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Totally creepy - with beautiful atmospheric nightmarish spooky world-bending prose Johnson tricked me into reading what counts I suppose as a suspense thriller. For Johnson a murder mystery isn't good enough if you're only wondering whodunit; for much of the book the question is who was killed - by whom is only a secondary (but still captivating) question. And there are ghosts witches and demons. And a fed up city cop out of his element in crazy coastal northern california. In addition to being a fabulously well-written book, it's also just really...cool. Early in I described it to a friend as David Lynch in book form, and having finished it I stand by that.

[Jayden McComiskie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is easily one of my new favourite books. Think 'True Detective' with less functioning Cohle. It's a Southern gothic nightmare.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the great books of all time. I read the last 50 or so pages as slow as possible because I didn't want it to end.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very atmospheric and unsettling. I love the way he writes.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pure. Epic. Dark. Glorious. There really are so many ADJECTIVES I could use to describe this one. I am very picky. I always have to be sure the book is worth reading. This one is.

[Claire Woodard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Top 5 book

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finally read this thing after over 13 years of trying - solely because a buddy of mine championed it as his favorite book and has been urging it on me ever since. After finishing it, I have to admit, I'm left mildly wondering why he chose this particular book to hold in such high esteem.

On the one hand, Johnson is a very engaging writer. Frequently funny, and also just a plain interesting - his sentences were often just ... surprising in a way that kept me reading not so much for the plot but just for the sheer charm of his prose. The characters he creates are interesting, though his female characters feel somewhat elusive and maybe not fleshed out enough.

There is a plot with some potential at the center of this book - a set of circumstances are set up, but somehow the book feels more interested in the internal world - primarily of a few of the male characters - which gives it a meandering, kind of dreamy quality. Johnson has a written an epistolary novel of sorts - which affords him a more expansive canvas to explore the inner worlds of at least couple of the main characters. Shifts in point of view between different characters while retreading the same event from different perspectives, and chopping up and mixing up the timeline of the book make the story more dynamic and offers the sense that the reader is piecing together a puzzle, but by the end of it I wasn't exactly sure what that puzzle added up to.

There are some thoughts interwoven here about free will vs predetermination, as well as some supernatural stuff (hence the "gothic" subtitle, I guess) that i take that Johnson has derived at least as a starting point, from "A Course in Miracles". As best I can make out, it seems to me that Johnson is imagining a world where both individual agency and some larger cosmological order to the universe are both at play. On the whole I enjoyed the book, but I left it wondering what the hell it finally all about.

[Al · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was my fourth Denis Johnson book, and I think I've read one too many. Set in post-hippie Northern California, it's the story of a loosely connected group of stoners and aimless, dangerous people whose lives intertwine (and many end) for inconsequential reasons. What passes for a plot serves mostly as a platform for Johnson's exploration of his characters' lives, with a heavy focus on nihilism, musings on reincarnation, and the effect of dissipation on human beings. Although Johnson's descriptive powers are good, it requires work to read this because he delights in making things confusing. Many times I just didn't understand what he was saying, and the conversations among his characters were often so long and undifferentiated that it was hard to tell who was talking. He also strings together sentences that, even when read several times, just don't seem to really say anything. Maybe this is purposeful, since many of the characters were strung out, for one reason or another, almost all the time. So, it's reasonable that the descriptive paragraphs should be the same way, I guess. Anyway, in the end, I was just tired, and while I regretted that I wasn't sure what had really happened, I didn't care enough to try to figure it out.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Where to begin, where to end, and of course what thoughts do I not say? The last question would be what Denis Johnson forgo to ask himself, the characters are all what you would expect from his writing: lost, searching for some faded dream that is usually fueled by too many ingested chemicals. But that's not the problem of course, the problem would be this feels not even like a first draft but an earlier version where even ideas were still left in the text. This is a hard read, the narration switched from first to third so much, and in that you loose the best of all the main characters ( yes that is correct, the way this is written their are around 8 of them) Van Ness. I really wanted so much more from this book, but it's length and time spent on characters and sub plots that meant nothing made me only want to shut the book and read Jesus Son again.

[Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pynchon's "Vineland," Anderson's "Boonville," Christopher Moore's black farces -- many good novels have been set on the Mendocino coast, but this may be the best of the bunch. Johnson completely nails the place, the people, and the vibe; and as usual delivers a satisfyingly complex tale peopled by unforgettable characters. This guy is turning into one of my favorite writers.

[Roxy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alright. Let's see if I can get myself back into the headspace that befell me as I read the final 30 or so pages of this last night. [Spoilers ahead]

Of course these last pages included a quote from Hesse's "Demian" [one of my favorite books]. It tied the whole thing together, and also solidified that, yes, I really really really do like this novel, in spite of my annoyance with Johnson's chronic tendency to describe female characters in that typical white-male gaze manner. Then again, I can *almost* excuse it because those descriptions were from the gaze of his white-male characters. Nonetheless. I do really really really like this book. And there were too many compelling factors to sell it short at four stars.

So, those factors. Number one, the prose. He managed to write a novel that involved both post modernism in addition to super stream-of-conscious-y poetic, gorgeously detailed, gothic prose. This was possible, I think, because of the book containing multiple perspectives - even though the perspectives were often written in third person (as in, sections of the book focused on one character and then another), the style of prose changed subtly among these characters. Basically, number two, Johnson breaks rules in this book, but makes it work. He did things that don't make a ton of sense structurally - jumping in time to the future sporadically, beginning the book with an emphasis on a character whose focus/perspective is forsaken early on (you start the book thinking he is the protagonist. You end the book realizing he just drove the plot, puppeteering much of what happens behind the scenes). And ends the book on none of the characters of focus.

Number three, it utterly keeps its promise as a "California Gothic." Re: the California part - I've been living in San Francisco for over 7 years now. I am not sure how I ended up here, and I am *still* not sure how to make sense of this place. I am not totally grounded, I have yet to completely land. The novel's setting is in Central-Northern California, places like Point Arena and Gualala and Jenner, north of San Francisco, an area I've taken a couple road-trips to, and have both fond and complicated memories of. Anyway, characters like Navarro and Van Ness seem to have landed in a similar position to this land. Somehow here, destined without fully knowing why or how, and using whatever brain-power they have to make sense of a place so absurd (Van Ness: nihilistic philosophy. a place to end and die./Navarro -cynical comparisons to his former life, his former land. trying to use his work and falling in love to make it all bearable - both of which ultimately fail.) The confusion, the dreamy absurdity of the place is represented through recurring themes of winding roads, the out-of-place huge Buddhist temple (this part is important - will discuss soon!), the backdrop of drugs and marijuana in people's bodies and stories and the wind, the fog shielding reality and sporadic thunderstorms rebirthing characters and driving narratives to a new place, a surfer's impulsive, ~far-out~ decision-making, a guru that concretizes the piece as one both gothic and magical-realist.

The next factor: Synchronicity or something like it. My undergraduate creative writing professor, Warren Hecht, introduced me to Denis Johnson when he assigned Jesus's Son in my first year creative writing class, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Another strange place I somehow ended up in, but as opposed to California, mostly felt at home in. Anywho. Something about that struck me, that I picked this book out at a bookstore in Berkeley, having known the author from another strange place, and that now I'm somehow here.

But to be honest, I'm not fully just *somehow* here. I moved to Berkeley from Michigan to partake in a full-time work-study program at a Tibetan Buddhist meditation center. Now. This is the wild thing. That ginormous strange Buddhist temple that runs as a theme throughout the book? I am 99% sure he is referencing a place called Odiyan, built right around the setting of the novel, by the volunteers of the organization that brought me out here in the first place. Now. Just. What in the heck. This isn't a landmark. This isn't an organization or a place many people, aside from some locals near Odiyan, know about. It really is an enigma. And it feels even more enigmatic and synchronous given what led me to pick out this book in the first place. I can't totally wrap my head around it, still.

Lastly. It becomes apparent, to me at least, that this whole book is rather rooted in not just nihilism, but, by the end, Jungian and Buddhist thought (speaking of synchronicity and Buddhism). This becomes particularly apparent when Hesse (whose works were directly influenced by Jung and Buddhism) is referenced at the end of our protagonist Nelson Fairchild's journey - an awakening - an understanding of the secret plot working against him throughout the book, and also a deeper confrontation with life, death, Truth itself, as he struggles to write his final philosophical words with his own blood as ink. Like Hesse's stories, the novel capitulates in the hero's coinciding awakening and death.

This isn't just some noir with kooky characters and a lot of action. I imagine a lot of people could read this at such a surface-level and perhaps appreciate Johnson's prose but not his story. I also imagine that familiarity with the setting makes for a deeper understanding. Then again, people should know better! The book's powers and depth materialize more and more as the story goes on, and there's a lot to still analyze and appreciate even now. I recommend the book to fans of existentialism, fans of Hermann Hesse, fans of gothic literature, fans of poetic prose, fans of or those curious about Central-Northern California, fans of 1990's hippiedom...

I also deeply recommend that the Coen Bros. adapt this into a film. How do I get in touch with them?

[Cheri · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book made me wish I was already dead. I read Jesus' son by Denis Johnson & greatly enjoyed it. This book left me frustrated and dismayed. I couldn't follow the story, I didn't feel the characters were developed enough. I really had no feelings or interest for any of the characters in the book. Occasionaly I would get a few pages of Denis Johnson's talent but for the most part I was greatly disappointed. It took me so long to finish this book because I really had to force myself to get through it.

[Mark Miano · Rating 2 out of 5]

With about 200 pages to go in ALREADY DEAD by Denis Johnson, I’m crying “Uncle!,” waving the proverbial white flag, and just plain old giving up.

Johnson is clearly a gifted writer, evident from the pyrotechnical first sentences of the book, but if those magical words don’t amount to a story I care about, I can’t keep going.

In my younger days I would have continued to toil away, little by little, until reaching the book’s denouement. Now I just don’t give a damn. Life is too short and there are far too many other books to explore.

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a romp. I read Johnson for the sentences. No matter how far afield the plot or interiority of the characters may wander, I don't feel completely lost. He's also a master of tone, setting and humor. Maybe the most effective lyrical writer of our time.

[Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's the Johnson take on a Stephen King book: metaphysical murder musings that gave me bad dreams. A worthy read - some of his most beautiful writing paired with a digressive plot that never quite coheres or disperses in the way you want it to.

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow. I don't know what to say. I may have to stop reading novels for a while after this one.

[John Everett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too goddam much writing, too many points of view; a lot of nice elements lost in a jumbled unsatisfying mess. Promising neo-noir plot riddled with spiritual hoohah and half-baked poetry.

[Phil reading_fastandslow · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Bushidō means ‘the way of the warrior’, a Japanese samurai concept. The idea is, the samurai achieves total detachment by seeing himself as already dead.”

Bushidō becomes a guiding principle for many of the novel’s characters in this sort of Zen Noir, illustrating the novel’s deep concern with identity, violence, and the possibility of transcendence through detachment.

Already Dead is structurally ambitious and philosophically saturated, in the best possible way. The timeline shifts without warning, voices overlap, and at one point, a pivotal revelation arrives in a long handwritten letter that delivers deranged exposition. The plot was confusing at times, but I eventually locked into its mosaic quality.

The prose is exactly what I have come to expect from DJ…blazing, feverish, often messianic. Johnson writes not just to describe but to elevate, to pull the visible world into the realm of the symbolic. His language veers from the lush to the incantatory. He isn’t afraid to slow the story down for a few pages to ask: What is a soul? Why do we destroy what we love?

Beneath the beauty and madness runs that cold Bushidō logic: the clearest thought, the boldest act, comes only when the fear of death is extinguished. To be “already dead,” in Johnson’s world, is to be finally free, however brutal or broken that freedom may look.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I write this review, I have to come to terms with the fact that I've finished this novel. I didn't want it to end. It's so ridiculously well written that on average, every 3-4 pages, there would be a sentence or a paragraph or turn of phrase that is so bravely and perfectly conceived that it stops you, and you have to reread it. So as you are hurling through what amounts to a neo-noir and vaguely metaphysical thriller set in the haze of NorCal, you have to stop and marvel at passages that have no business working, never mind achieving brilliance. A truly grand novel from a master.