This is what inevitably happens when dudes from California get into nietzsche. Nonsense and incense and beautiful prose! See you on the other side Dennis.

Throw plot out the window, still a great time. Deadly funny sentences.

"it strikes me suddenly that birds must actually, sometimes, die in midair. i've never seen this truth before--that sometimes they must enter heaven having lifted themselves halfway there. it seems such a little thing to understand, but i start shaking. i'm afraid if i try to touch something i'll pass my shimmering hand through the mirage of my life."

After the potency of Jesus' Son, Fiskadoro, and Angels this is soft-bellied and slack, and only the wild characters kept it interesting. But literature has to be more than just wild characters with wild stories, in the end it's the writing itself that matters, and this struck me as the product of a racing pencil and a lazy eraser.

I'm not sure I'll even attempt the similarly thick Tree of Smoke after this bloated stoner of a novel.

With about 200 pages to go in ALREADY DEAD by Denis Johnson, I’m crying “Uncle!,” waving the proverbial white flag, and just plain old giving up.

Johnson is clearly a gifted writer, evident from the pyrotechnical first sentences of the book, but if those magical words don’t amount to a story I care about, I can’t keep going.

In my younger days I would have continued to toil away, little by little, until reaching the book’s denouement. Now I just don’t give a damn. Life is too short and there are far too many other books to explore.

This is a Northern California book. Ukiah and Point Arena and redwoods and such.

I was not enjoying this book at all until I got to the middle, and Denis Johnson's special sense of humor finally showed up to the party. The characters get more interesting as the book goes along, and there are a lot of characters - then the book fell down toward the ending for pages and pages and kept hitting the same branch: Rambling descriptions of paranoia, psychedelia, drunkeness, and spirit voyage. As fun as that all sounds it gets a bit redundant.

FRUSTRATING me was Johnson's refusal to take the perspective of the many female characters in the book (the most vibrant characters this book has) including a beautiful witch, a wandering Canadian born-again Christian, a waitress, a wife that gets taken by a mischievous spirt, and a promiscuous Bavarian woman.

I root for Denis Johnson because he is alive and American and still writing books that are very original and funny. One of his endearing methods is to write books inspired by disparate literary sources. This book, for example, was inspired by a 55-line poem by Bill Knott. He also quotes from something called 'A Course In Miracles', a book published by the Foundation for Inner Peace in Tiburon. AND he quotes Pedro Meseguer, SJ, a Catholic priest and psychologist. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, 'Thus Spake Zarathustra' figures HEAVILY in the plot.

I guess he can't thrill me every time, but luckily I still have more Denis Johnson books to read and he is still alive to write new ones.

I intend to read more of Johnson, particularly the acclaimed Jesus' Son, but man, this book annoyed me big-time (scholarly phrase). At times I thought the author's descriptive language and character immersion was brilliant, but at other times I thought he'd written much of the book while he was high, because of the larding on of what seemed gratuitous—and lengthily gratuitous—mental meanderings of the characters.

I also thought a number of the POV shifts were clumsy and took me out of the narrative, and that some of the character behaviors were sensationalized and often not credible in the story arc. I recommend the book for some of its writerly highs, but not for when the writer seemed as though he was high. (Having written myself while high doesn't make me an expert, but I can smell the roaches.)

In my Fibber-McGee's-closet of a mind, I always confuse this book with Pynchon's Vineland. I don't know why exactly but I do know why approximately. It's because they both take place in rural Northern California, a vast and uniformly blighted land (though beloved by bemillions) and they were both big let downs for me. I felt like a lover betrayed after reading this novel, like all that Johnson had said and done (that is, all we'd said and done together) in Angels and especially in Jesus Son had been a lie, overturned by this bloated (in comparison) behemoth.

He was the check-out clerk who always had something to say. Not in an annoying way; not like, just because he worked in a used book store, that made him some kind of expert. Rather, that there was a better than average chance that your purchase could give him a moment's joy. So, he didn't just zap the stuck-on bar code. He held the book. Bit by bit, his face broke into a wry smile. "'A California Gothic'"?

He set this book in California, specifically with an opening scene driving on U.S. 101 in Mendocino County, but also with cultural hues like a 'time-chasm', 'karmic aether' and 'the fire-breath of her astral shelf'. A fog of cynicism, a smoke, from having one foot still in Vietnam, will not lift. We are lost. . .we are scrotally alone in the universe. There is death, but, more so, dying. The act and art of dying. He 'dates' the chapters by separate days or by a handful of days, all between August and October, 1991. Yet, even in those few months, the days crisscross, like 'Pulp Fiction', a character we know to be dead, returned to die again. Already dead. So, yes, a California Gothic.

He uses constantly shifting points of view, almost always a third-person observation with a hint of omniscience. The third-person is invariably one of the handful of main male characters, the female characters having roles which allow the male characters to react or which serve to perpetuate a stereotype (a Wyccan priestess; a born-again; a Black Widow). This allows him to open virtually every chapter with a a few paragraphs of HE, challenging the reader to identify which of the guys is wandering in the fog. In a few chapters, he failed to figure out which he he was writing about.

He is not unintelligent, some say, but he can be an asshole, others believe.

One of the main characters is a cop, flawed, but with a capacity for understanding.

It wasn't the badge's fault. The badge caused nothing. It didn't give you the disease, it only warned the others that you had it.

Modern movements might nod knowingly, in unison; might bookmark it for later usage. But that's not what this was about. This was neither chant not rant. It was a Blues. Of souls lost in a certain time and a certain place. California Purples.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKzg...

Totally creepy - with beautiful atmospheric nightmarish spooky world-bending prose Johnson tricked me into reading what counts I suppose as a suspense thriller. For Johnson a murder mystery isn't good enough if you're only wondering whodunit; for much of the book the question is who was killed - by whom is only a secondary (but still captivating) question. And there are ghosts witches and demons. And a fed up city cop out of his element in crazy coastal northern california. In addition to being a fabulously well-written book, it's also just really...cool. Early in I described it to a friend as David Lynch in book form, and having finished it I stand by that.

Where to begin, where to end, and of course what thoughts do I not say? The last question would be what Denis Johnson forgo to ask himself, the characters are all what you would expect from his writing: lost, searching for some faded dream that is usually fueled by too many ingested chemicals. But that's not the problem of course, the problem would be this feels not even like a first draft but an earlier version where even ideas were still left in the text. This is a hard read, the narration switched from first to third so much, and in that you loose the best of all the main characters ( yes that is correct, the way this is written their are around 8 of them) Van Ness. I really wanted so much more from this book, but it's length and time spent on characters and sub plots that meant nothing made me only want to shut the book and read Jesus Son again.

they had us in the first half i ain’t gon lie