I enjoyed this novel very much (read it 20 years ago) and would like to read it again.

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.

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.

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

Johnson writes like a dream, one Dantean page after another. As was the case with its younger sibling, n  Tree of Smoken, 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.

***************n  SPOILERS IN THE FOLLOWINGn*************

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.

there are things about this story i didn’t understand and some i didn’t care for, but overall, his writing is too great, the characters too alive and the story too wild for me not to love it.

I struggled with this book. Too many points of view with nothing to really tell them apart. The writing rambled on, and more often than not, I found myself not invested enough to back and re-read. Johnson seemed to get too poetic for his own good.

I'm going to revisit this book after a few years, because maybe it was brilliant but just the wrong time for me to read it.

This is a tough book to call. Denis Johnson is an awesome writer, and the vision and specific descriptions in the book are wonderful to behold. But, there is also a problem with the sense of movement. For the first couple hundred pages, the book really brings you along with a sense of anticipation. But then it simply, well, goes away! A few scenes are just weird and trippy; a few affairs are pretty irrelevant; and ultimately, I almost gave up on it three times - the last of these just a few dozen pages from the end! (That last is a good indication of a serious problem.). It was nice to see some Nietzsche quotes make their way into the narrative, and some other speculative ideas about mind and nature, but they didn't go all that far, either.

But then, being who I am, I wonder, too, is it me? Did I miss something? Was I in the wrong "space" for this book? Is it the kind of book where you're already supposed to be a D.J. Fan? (This was my first of his novels.). I picked it up in part because I love Northern California settings for novels, and this was very embedded in a North Bay forest landscape, Mountain View Road and Booneville and redwoods and pot plants and absurd post-hippies. But folks will nevertheless do better with old standbys from Pynchon or Boyle or Robbins.

Obviously fantastically written, but could have benefitted from being a tad shorter with some more strict editing...

I wanted to like it. It didn't really work out.

Not that the first time around didn't dazzle me, but before reviewing this book I thought it would be good to reread it. Already dead is an absolutely beautiful book about a few small towns in Mendocino county and the deranged people that live there. Their lives intertwine in to a story which makes my jaw drop. The opening paragraph I think gives you a glimpse in to Johnson's poetic genius.

"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 traveling down the coast from Seattle into Mendocino County, wasn't even to be dreamt of in Van Ness's world."

It’s interesting that the New Age concept of channeling plays such a prominent part in “Already Dead” as Denis Johnson seems to be trying so hard to invoke the voices of other authors. Mostly Don DeLillo. There’s an overpowering DeLillo influence here. Johnson also clomps down trails well-traveled by California fantasists Tim Powers and James Blaylock. He writes a leaden, tin-eared imitation of Elmore Leonard dialog that floats off the tongue like dribbled shot pellets. And God help us when he starts regurgitating Nietzsche to impress the black-turtleneck crowd. It’s all terribly contrived and artificial. Among the novel’s would-be-colorful cast of freaks, criminals, drug dealers, drifters, mystics, cops, surfers and assassins, there’s not one single three-dimensional human being; not one genuine, believable relationship or interaction; not one honest line of dialog that might conceivably be spoken by a real person. Occasionally, Johnson wrestles his pretensions under control to write something interesting enough to suggest there was the seed of a good novel here before it was positively buried in bullshit. What a waste. Some novels are so wondrously conceived that they take on a vibrant life in the reader’s mind. Other stories lie there stillborn, never getting off the page. “Already Dead” was aptly named.