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.

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.

Real damn good, but awful baggy in places too.

Frustrating in many ways but the good stuff in here is good enough to make it a solid read. Captures the fogginess and murkiness of true Northern California in a way I haven't seen anyone really attempt (the only thing that has ever evoked a vibe of the area for me is Thomas Ligotti's The Frolic), the windy roads and dense forests and commodified coastline, the rednecks and weed burnouts and small business tyrants and new age mystics. The weird timeline shenanigans and epistolary portions and changing perspectives add to this, the idea of never getting your head around what's happening around you, of only vague feelings of dread, doom, and uncertainty. If there's a sort of unifying thought, it's of the men throughout the narrative being already dead, both spiritually and in a fatalistic way, all their schemes and attempted loves an attempt to put off the inevitable and grasp at fleeting pleasure where no lasting stability or happiness is possible for them due to their condition. The women are a bit of cranks (it's Northern California after all), channeling spirits, doing mysticism, having Christian ecstasies, but they are far more in control of their fate and their desires than the men, even without the pretensions and plots. Have my critiques, namely that it's a bit too long, a tad too focused on the men, but there is payoff in the end, the death at the coastline and the ghost's all washed into shore waiting to welcome their newest member, another in the line of sinners and degenerates to haunt it forever, the psychosexual possession and psychedelic trip.

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.

“live-evil-veil” - “i want to die like this river. i want to drift away and i want to be clear and cold. and underneath my passing i want a cruel bed of stones.”

I really enjoyed parts, but there were others that were unreadable.

There was a time in my life when I would have thought a book about men swinging their guns around and fumbling with their penises while grimly quoting nietzsche at each other was the truest artistic expression of reality. But dude I'm in my 30s now.

Denis Johnson has tremendous respect from me as the author of Train Dreams and this was interesting for me to see him take a whack at a genre / poetic mashup. "Book 1" I found the most compelling. Really strong sense of voice when the failson is narrating. Books 2 and 3 are mired in misses at conjuring a sense of horror without the consistency of a single monster. Instead we get a patchwork of local folklore that blur each other out, kelpies, toad venom, new age witches, a cop who has sex in a graveyard (get it, more sex and death because this is gothic noir, but also more amateur psychology of porn addiction and Nietzsche because litfic) oh and cannibalism (that one came outta nowhere and I don't know if that was my favorite part or just totally silly).

Already Dead reads like a darker The Big Lebowski, filled with a similar cast of quirky characters, and strange dream like sequences. I enjoyed the hell out of it. The plot gets mired in the murk at times, and may take a re-read to fully untangle, but it’s worth the journey in the end.

Tommy and Falls ❤️

That anyone could read Already Dead and determine it less than an exquisite, humane, disturbed, finely rendered novel about eternal themes (among them: fuck-up, addiction, the sickness in the heart of people waylaid in their exile) is, I guess, a testament to whatever weird chasm divides one reader's taste from another. I'd contest some of the negative reviews sail so far wide of the mark that it's impossible they're not at least a little proud of it.

God, where to begin. Other than to say *possible spoilers*.

Is it possible for one book to be perfectly balanced between addictive and repulsive, lucid and impenetrable? This is my second novel by Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke being the first) and both left me feeling completely hollowed out by the end, which is appropriate for a story that involves the creation and re-animation of empty vessels, empty lives.

I picked up this book in a Pacific Northwest airport, and nearly missed my flight because I could not stop reading. There was a shock of recognition in that he was spiraling into a part of Northern California that I know and love, and that he had nailed the sense and sweep of it so well that a flood of memories came back almost instantly.

This is not unknown territory for writers, it is almost a complete geographic overlay with Pynchon's Vineland, and perhaps the slightly more southern cousin of Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. I count both books among my favorites so I figured I was in for roughly more of the same. Eccentric characters with intertwined lives. Desolate towns. Forbidding, beautiful landscape and sense of place.

What I was not expecting was the darkness, the almost operatic sadness that fills nearly every page. Like every good gothic or horror story a few cracks of light break though, but they seem weakened here, almost to reassure the reader that there really is no return from the Lost Coast, at least, not for everyone. And also like all the best, almost a prerequisite for the genre, it has a truly original and charismatic monster in Carl Van Ness.

Johnson is a master at conjoining the obscene and sublime, renderings of ugly truth with the surreal and magical. They are his treble and bass. However, I found the chronological rambling and difficulty of sensing the players in the various interpersonal dialogues to be disorienting. Perhaps this was the intended effect, but I can tell from the 8 months I've spent with this on my bookshelf, nightstand or suitcase that it is not easily left off and returned to. It deserves and rewards your attention and careful scrutiny.

Already Dead is not for everyone. It's not for the casual reader, the squeamish or easily depressed to be certain. It will definitely be coming with me though on my next trip into the dark and wild corners of Northern California.