God, what a wonderful writer Denis Johnson was. His debut novel contains everything that would come to define him: biting humor, warm humanity, characters living on the knife edge of society, etc. This one nearly moved me to tears by the end of it.

All time feel bad story. A greyhound bus odyssey through the bleakest corners of America. The prose is beautifully grimy and leaves you with a sense of hope and a bad taste in your mouth at the same time. Not a lighthearted read, but a satisfying one that made me appreciate how good I actually have it.

4.5 stars (they need to add half star ratings to this dogshit platform)

Bill Houston was experimenting with his butane lighter, holding it upside down and trying to keep it lit. “The gas wants to go up,” he explained to her, “but then it has to go down before it can go up. It don’t know what to do.”

Like so much fluid in a cheap plastic Bic, our lives flow along paths equally perplexing and predictable. We don’t know what to do either, but to whatever depths we sink and however high we rise, most of it can probably be chalked up to circumstance. Wherever we end up and however we end up getting there, it seems the only thing we can count on is the whole mess going BOOM, and usually far too soon.

That’s what this book is ultimately about, or at least it was for me anyway.

Speaking as someone who hasn’t spent a single night in jail for at least eleven years, it's surprising how much I found myself relating to Johnson’s shady, criminal-minded characters. The (mostly) reformed Arthur Graham standing here today has come a long way since juvie hall, that’s for sure, but as a result of my own experiences – not to mention those of all the thieves, fiends, and hoods I’ve known along the way – I found the Houstons and their associates more than just a little familiar. From plasma bank patrons to public defense lawyers, a sorry bunch the lot of 'em, but not altogether without humanity.

Real people with real problems? You could say that. When you’re poor, your options are limited, and when your options are limited, it’s all too easy to take whatever cheap thrills you can get. When those thrills revolve around substances, sex, and whatever it takes to retain those scraps of solace in your otherwise miserable life, it’s all too easy to end up on the wrong side of the law. And unlike those born into the world of privilege, those who can afford the vices and pay the prices, it’s usually the Greyhound-riding, flophouse-dwelling dregs of society who get the raw deal. And that's no spoiler by any means — that's just real life.

As for the writing itself, Johnson blends a stark, subjective realism with some beautifully rendered imagery, at times quite nightmarish, the combined effect of which forces the reader into the shoes as well as the heads of his tragically human characters.

I get that this book is beautifully written, but this book made me suffer. It made me suffer a great deal, on almost every page. The worst part was in Chicago, but things never 100% rebounded after that. I might be a sensitive flower but I really couldn't handle it.

I got Denis Johnson and Dennis Cooper mixed up. Big mistake. One is a loathsome creep and the other is clearly the American prose master I have missed these many years, but intend to catch up on very soon. I see DJ just won the National Book Award.
To my ears DJ has the best ear for hardboiled dialogue since Raymond Chandler although it's clear he doesn't give a rat's ass about plot. But on this broke busted disgusted bum steer of a planet you takes em where you finds em.

Not my favourite by Denis Johnson but obviously still a great book. As in most of his oeuvre, the focus is on people on the bottom rung on society, continually going further down, but described with bleak humour and heartbreakingly beautiful prose. He's the master of finding the grandeur of human spirit in squalor and despair, moving and repulsive in the same breath.

This book has been on my to-read list for about a decade. Year after year it got pushed back and forgotten and now finally, finally, I have entered the world of Denis Johnson.

This is a quick read, I read it over two days. We start of with Jamie, a runnaway mother with two small children on a greyhound bus who despite being “done with men” hooks up with Bill Houston on the bus and together they journey down into the pits of life – drug use, alcohol, rape, robbery, insanity, murder, execution.

Johnson packed a lot into his compact book and I think the story could have been better embelished, the characters more fleshed out. Mrs Houton’s character particularly resounded with me, she reminded me of one of Yates’ pathetic characters; living in denial and with an air of pretence about her. She’s wonderfully insane.

Desperation. All the people in this book are bogged down with sadness and desperation.

The writing is wonderfully done. It’s rich with imagery and grit. I can feel the Arizona sun bear down on the character’s faces, I can taste the tequila and lemon on my tongue as they do shots in the car. I only wish there was more backstory and detail. Another 100 pages could’ve solved that.

DEATH IS THE MOTHER OF BEAUTY

“‘I’m at the doctor. He says, I gotta cut off your thumb and your finger, Mr. Cooper. They both have to go. I’m chopping them off. Oh, man, no, not my finger. Not my thumb. I go around for a couple weeks, okay? — oh, no, they’re gonna cut off my finger, they’re gonna cut off my thumb. I go down, the big day arrives, I’m going crazy, and just at the last minute the doc says, well, how about if we just cut off your finger? Oh, boy! Just my finger? Sure! Gladly! Get it?’ he asked Bill Houston. ‘Doctors do that all the time. They tell you the worst. They say, we’re gonna amputate two things — so you don’t feel bad for the rest of your life when they just amputate one. You’re the thumb. You’re here for the benefit of the liberals who have to save somebody.’ He looked at Richard: ‘And you’re the finger they’re really gonna amputate. You’re dying for William H. Houston’s sins.’”

Reminded me of the Glass family but even more tragically American, hard to read at some points but really great

’They’d all been keeping her in the dark, like a child in a house of sickness.’

*3,5

I’m wrecked

The first I read by Denis Johnson was his story, Emergency. I was floored. The drive-up cinema screening in a blizzard that may or may not have been a military cemetery. The rabbit babies. “I save lives”. Floored. After, I read the rest of Jesus’ Son. Then came Train Dreams; McCarthy meets Magical Realism. Never has sparse prose taken readers so close to God or nothing. The same goes for Angels. Oh boy does he make your stomach turn. Johnson takes characters with nothing to lose then manipulates them until nothing turns itself inside out.
This is a book about Angels falling and rising—in that order. This is a book about redemption and forgiveness and it’s relationship to death. My copy is published by vintage contemporaries. The publisher could not be more appropriate. Angles was published in the eighties, but its content is contemporary. Its complexities are our complexities.
Here are some words from Johnson:
“The Highway Patrol kept the prison side of Route 89 clear of the seekers and desirers, the ones who had to be there, the ones who sought to know. But the dirt margin of the road in the town side was lined with campers and motorcycle and trucks, with their owners and the children and families of the owners, who placed their forearms and elbows on these machines and leaned on them quietly for support during the vigil. It was dark. The blue roof-lights of the police raked their faces. Everything about the moment conspired time keep them silent: the death of stars in the East where the sun prepared to rise out of Tucson eighty miles away, the deep emptiness of the pre-dawn heavens, the imperious stupor of the Arizona State Prison Complex across the road and over the squad cars parked in its shoulder and beyond a cultivated field of cotton, its sand-colored structures on fire with the orange light of numberless sodium arc-lamps, and over all of the dawn of execution day, the desert night’s dry foreboding, the negligent powerful breath of the day’s coming heat, the heat that burns away each shadow and incinerates every last particle of shit inside the heart. But at the hours it was still cool—in their hands some of these people cradled styrofoam cups of steam.”