Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgXeE...

Loved it. I have my students read it too. I'm looking at some parallels to the experience of reading Dante's Inferno.

Began re-reading this thing recently and then had to back off for a while. My own life was too stressful, and you better be on solid ground when you read Angels, because Johnson isn't going to spare you anything. He begins with homelessness and moves onto gang rapes (plural), the psych ward, a murder, death row. You feel kind of relieved when all the main character has to worry about is his girlfriend being looped up on red wine and speed at the family cookout or a few shots being fired at him out a window while he's repossessing a BMW and a Harley. Johnson gets away with it because of his immense delicacy. He is never sentimental or sensationalistic, never trying to merely shock. When he leads his man to the gas chamber, I worried for the author, wondered how Johnson was getting through it (I recall how Chekhov agonized over killing the child in "In the Ravine"). He's going to the same place your brain goes during nightmares—hitting those dread notes, behind which there better be something divine, what Johnson would probably call grace (see angels of title), or we're all in trouble. The book, which may quietly be his best, is a masterpiece.

A novel of extraordinary power rendered in exquisite, muscular prose. It's incredibly bleak and often disturbing. But it's phenomenally well written and has one of the most emotionally distressing endings I've ever read. It's not often I shed tears at books but this one did it at the end.

Denis Johnson was a master craftsman who belongs on the same shelf with Cormac McCarthy and Donald Ray Pollock.

Misery can be of all sorts but it is always measured out generously… And Denis Johnson’s world is packed with weirdoes and crazies…

“The world was made in 1914. Before 1914 there was nothing. Eleven people are in charge of the world. They make up the news and the history books, they control everything you think you know. They wrote the Bible and all the other books. Most people are wooden people, controlled by remote control. There’s only a few of us who are real, and we’re getting fooled.”

The heroine is a harassed mother of two little girls on the run…

Jamie lay flat on her back on the green table. If she stared at the white acoustic tiles of the ceiling and kind of let her eyes go loose, the pattern would shift and the tiles would seem to draw down on her until she was inside of them. There was nothing else to do right about now.
She was the only woman in this row of tables. In the entire room, which was the size of a ballroom, there were four women and nearly fifty men, each stretched out on a green table with a green sheet, getting a good look at the ceiling.

The hero is an indifferent man of the gloomy past on the drift…

Bill Houston went, “Oooooooh!” – meaning to launch into a song, like a drunken sailor, but he faded off, forgetting what to sing. He wasn’t a sailor any more anyway. He was just a fool on the move, no less bitter than the wind. He was an ex-sailor, and an ex-offender – though he couldn’t, for the life of him, say who it was he had offended – and he was an ex-husband – three ex-husbands

And the miserable are thrown together like trash carried by a muddy torrent after the thunderstorm…
And angels are far away up in heaven and they care least.

I would have put this book down after chapter one except for two reasons: I was reading it with a small group, and it was only 209 pages. I know it was Johnson's first novel, but if it's any indication of the direction of his work, I will not choose to read another one of his.

The quality of the writing, the imagery, and some beautiful sentences has earned it 3 stars from me. What I cannot deal with are the hopelessness of the characters and the bleakness of the story. Not my kind of book is putting it mildly, but the novel has won awards and is liked a lot by other reviewers, so don't rely on my opinion alone. Just be warned that despair is the order of the day in this one.

Denis Johnson is a terrific writer and it is unfortunate that his masterpiece, "Angels", is overshadowed by 'Jesus' Son" - they are both splendid novels, but for me nothing beats the way this novel gets inside and tears you apart and it is subtle and sneaky about it. The story contains a group of misfits each one stuck in their own self-made prisons, either by addiction or childbirth or both, and the reader cannot help but feel she is looking over a great manmade rat maze with no end but death for the participating creatures that cannot see outside of the walls society, family, and their own choices, even without free will, have erected to make sure they never see another world, another way of being. The book comments on several important topics with great care, wisdom, and zero judgement: addiction, free will, capital punishment, motherhood, religion, rape, and the invisible traps set by families . . .
"Angels" is a short novel but nonetheless holds more within its covers than most door-stopper books. Denis Johnson is a writer of immense skill with a large, warm heart that tries to see the best in a world the seems to be conspiring against humanity. His works should be read and cherished even if one believes this optimistic line of thinking to be deluded.

This is the seventh Denis Johnson book that I've read and is easily my favorite one. Unlike the highly lauded and overrated Jesus' Son, whose characters have no redeeming characteristics, the ne'er-do-wells in Angels, although highly flawed, show some semblance of humanity and potential. The major characters--the three Houston brothers and Jamie, who tragically hooks up with Bill Houston early in the novel and subsequently follows him down a wormhole--are all characters of dubious integrity, yet I found myself rooting for them as the book unfolded. Johnson shows compassion and empathy for these characters without excusing their shortcomings or condoning their actions, and unlike some of Johnson's other works in which the characters show no signs of redemption, the characters in Angels rise from the ashes in one way or another, and it's a testament to Johnson's skills as a writer and compassion as a human being that the reader feels a kinship with these characters more than a knee-jerk revulsion--which on the surface would be a justified response to their atrocious behavior. The truth is that they're all simply trying to cope with their circumstances and experiences and to find their niche in a world that strips them of individuality and opportunity--and this is also true of the three brothers' mother, who has turned to religion for solace. Johnson explores numerous themes, including addiction, desperation, longing, dreams, hope, family, responsibility, accountability, despair, capital punishment, and the entire gamut of human emotions--and guides us along a wild journey while we marvel at his beautiful and visionary prose. It's surprising that this was Johnson's first novel since it is written with more creativity and maturity than those later books of his that have been more widely praised than this underrated marvel. Grade: A

Holy shit.

"..... something that people will tell themselves, something to pass the time it takes for the violence inside a man to wear him away, or to be consumed itself, depending on who is the candle and who is the light."

Halfway through Angels, I knew I just had to read everything ever written by Denis Johnson. Some writers are that special. This book made me gulp and sigh on nearly every page.

It does not really have a format. A lot of it is about Jamie and Bill Huston, a man and a woman who hook up during a bus journey when Jamie is on the run with her two kids. But it is mostly a bunch of scenes about the Huston brothers, their religious mother and their women. A heist gone wrong and Bill Huston's incarceration while awaiting the gas chamber are important events in the novel.

At times, I felt like Denis Johnson is such a good writer and he was showing off his mettle with all the beautiful prose, that I did not know much about Jamie and Bill Huston. Especially Jamie. The helpless and lost characters in Philip K Dick novels might have inspired Denis Johnson.

There is something beguiling about the fucked up working class people of the greatest country in the world. The characters are all alcoholics and drug addicts who live on impulse. I read up a bit on Denis Johnson. He was an alcoholic and drug addict himself. Angels is like a horror novel, written by a man who was once possessed by a demon, now sounding the fog horn for other men and women who are contenders to come under his malevolent influence.

Beautifully written, especially toward the end. The plot is kind of all over the place though; major disconnects between each chapter.

I think this will be my last Denis Johnson because I felt pretty nonplussed about Jesus's Son as well. And look, sure, I get it, his prose is pretty incredible, but I find it all really cold and clinical, there's no emotion in there, and barely any story either, and after a while, when you're only relying on pretty language, everything gets pretty boring. You start to check out. To not care. Especially in the second half, where he starts to descend into William Burroughs territory where you're not really sure what's going on, and not in a good way. And I'm sorry to all the Burroughs fans out there, but Naked Lunch is not big or clever, and it's not enjoyable to read either, much like this one. I enjoyed the first quarter or so, but then it started to get real repetitive. Honestly, I think I'm in need of some classic genre fiction or some oldschool YA to clean my brain out. Something that's actually enjoyable to read. Christ is that so fucking hard? And trust me, I feel bad giving this 2 stars, but there we go.