The noir I've been looking for, taking the exploitation and grinding it through the inspiration of poetry.

I really enjoyed this novel. Felt like I missed quite a bit. It would be a good candidate for a book club style deep dive dissection.

Did I miss a memo? Was there something I didn’t understand? Probably. I think four years of hardcore philosophy studies and I’d still be staring out at the void scratching my head. Still, “Already Dead” whizzed by this last week and a half, placing one slippery stone after the next in this wide impassable river of prose, such that I got to the end and thought wow, I have absolutely no idea what just happened, but I think I like it. I’ll hold off for further judgment until I read more of Johnson’s work (his recent award-winning “Tree of Smoke” or his short collection “Jesus’ Son”) and decide at some future date to take a closer look at “Already Dead.” But I think, contrary to skeptics (and I know of none, per se; reviews are nothing but glowing), there was a there there. To me, “Already Dead” was the literary equivalent of my beloved television series “Twin Peaks”: long on mystery, perhaps a bit short on explanation. I mean, Johnson’s halfway to a Lynchian atmosphere already with the quantum suicide subplot, the forests of misty redwoods, a host of intertwined paranoid schizophrenics, and at least one spooky channeler, just replace the enigmatic prose with a few midgets dancing backward in front of red curtain and you’ve got a home run. Enjoy it? Thoroughly. Is it for everybody? Probably not.

I love Denis Johnson. He sneaks poetry into his prose effortlessly and when the story is moving along he never gets too character heavy or prose heavy but conducts slight shifts in his prose that indicate which character is showcased. He is hard to read but easy to follow. He writes books for readers. His characters are dark and sublime, the kind of characters that serve as signposts in the discovery of one's own character. His stories force you to do thought experiments about yourself. When one character's section is thick and wordy you ask yourself if this is the play style of your game, or are you more like the broody cop, with his choppier thinking, easier communication, and deeper, more self-assured insight. In his books actions don't necessarily speak louder than thoughts, and it can lead to some sad and desperate rides. I kept asking myself where I fit in because I felt like I was a fringe character, a wallflower to this weird Northern California madness. Like Northern California's famous product, wine, I sipped at this book until it intoxicated me and then I slammed the whole book down, pungent and tart as it was. At times, when ingesting more than 20 page gulps at a time, I felt like I was enjoying Northern California's other infamous export.

I am going to continue to tackle every one of Johnson's works. Next I think I'll grapple with poetry. Already Dead (at least its plot) is based off some other guy's poem, which is interesting enough, but the poetry that he can't help sneaking in is enough to pull me toward his efforts in that arena. But I will still miss his simple writing, especially when it is spot on, such as in Already Dead when we experience so many demons and evil displayed and in the end all Johnson says about it is that "people like it" and that is enough and it is the kind of thing that sticks with a reader for a long time.

Evil: people like it.

Wow. ASTONISHING novel. At times the prose grabbed me with sheer exhiliration and pulled me onwards like a species of destructive hedonism. The dialogue especially is superb in patches - short punchy lines that convey a hell of a lot. It really feels new and fresh and heavy.

However there are some real big problems with this work, the most blindingly obvious being the COMPLETE LACK of FEMALE VOICES. The perspective jumps into the hearts and minds of about a dozen male characters over hundreds of pages - but not a single female character is explored. Why?

The other big problem is that the male voices are way too similar. There's a lot of gun fetish going on that seems almost puerile. A lot of hunting and madness. These characters are almost interchangeable and at times I couldn't tell which one we were following.

In theory the story is about a demon murdering his way into inheriting a huge piece of land. But most of the book is sub-plots that are explored and apparently left open. I got to the end but still had no idea what happened to most of these characters. I guess I could flick back through and unravel the plot but I wasn't that invested in those guys.

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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.

"I’m here to decide whether to let my life go, or fight to stay inside it.
To face the music, or stay dead.
Or — I’ve come here to be alone for the rest of my life with the tension, the beautiful tension, between those two alternatives. I may decide nothing. May stay here forever with my alternatives. May take them both out of here with me.
I just want to let myself be guided, in this solitude, by my truth."

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.

This absolutely sucked. It was nigh on unreadable and was pretentious drivel and dribble. I enjoyed Tree of Smoke by this author, but this novel was execrable and excremental. I actually deliberately left my copy on a bus, that's how much I hated it. BLUCK.

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.

favorite denis johnson novel. he is a motherfucking genius.

Beautifully written but lacking in plot, a bit too much in my opinion!