Johnson marries his own obsession with downwardly mobile deadbeats, druggies and losers with Cormac McCarthy's intense philosophical musings on death and spirituality and creates some sort of hideous but endlessly intriguing behemoth set in a reality reminiscent of "The Counselor," where characters are bound to spout off about Nietzsche every other sentence in a post-hippie northern California at the end of history.

This is the fourth Denis Johnson book I've read and there is no doubt that he is a gifted writer. But I have had mixed feelings about them. I absolutely loved "Nobody Move". I really liked "Tree of Smoke" and felt it could have been great but wandered too much so I wasn't sure what story I was reading. His novella, "Train of Dreams" left me blank and unmoved. "Already Dead" was beautifully written but dense and jumpy. The structure made it difficult for me to follow the story line as it moved from character to character and jumped back and forth in time. But it captured the atmosphere of the northern California coast wonderfully. I could really feel myself there in its damp fog bound beauty.
The story follows a complex set of relationships, primarily through Nelson Fairchild and his father, brother, wife, and drug dealing partner Clarence. Nelson has problems aplenty with a wife, Winona, who has abandoned him and stands to inherit the land his father owns along the north coast. Nelson, who grows marijuana with his partner is also being pursued by a pair of hitmen sent by a drug lord to get payment for a deal gone bad.
He comes across a mysical character named Van
Ness who may be his salvation but who ends up betraying him in the end.
The story is enfused with new-age mysticism characters, intrigue, violence and poetically beautifully descriptive language. There's a lot to digest in this book and I'm sure I didn't understand much of it but I think it may be worthwhile to re-read it again more slowly to better appreciate it.

it’s greasy lowlifes with interiors of spiritual grandeur;

some of the time shifts seem a little clunky but there’s a lot going on here, I wonder if this is secretly a really really good book it just needs more critical attention;

I’m not sure if this was so so gothic but it was definitely california

maybe grease gothic
grunge gothic

In keeping with the other novels by Denis Johnson that I have read, Already Dead is populated by a cast of human beings living in a permanent state of being ill-at-ease, unsettled by a natural world that forever seems to be watching humanity with a hungry, ravaging eye, no matter how drenchingly beautiful she may have garbed herself within any particular locale. In this case, it is Northern California, parked aside an immense, battering ocean harboring an array of secrets beneath its rolling surface and sporting a spread of mountain and valley vestments that match arid desert visages with a lush coiffure of trees, including ancient redwoods that thrust singularly and powerfully up towards the westward sky. Scarcely populated and sprinkled with small towns and villages, its people appear to be the tide-tossed detritus of the cultural storms that raged and burst across the sixties: seeking a communion with both the land and one another amidst natural splendor, but finding themselves no less kinked and pressed-down upon by lonely weariness and elemental gravity than their kith and kin hemmed by the vast metropolises to the south. No matter the vehicle, be it within the bottle, the bong, the bedroom, the pulpit, the kick of chemistry, the desert wastes or the forest cloakrooms, these people have found themselves utterly lost and forlorn, isolated, wracked within their own particular tormenting passions and alienated nature, seeking some manner of harmony in what could passably serve as Eden but forever breaking themselves upon the barriers of its infernal manifestation. Whether it be viewed through the lenses of supernatural occurrence or psychological spelunking, Johnson portrays this thin spread of flailing and desperate humanity as but fleshly vessels for spiritual opportunity and opportunists, the only trace of happiness to be found by those precious few who have glommed onto the fact that there exists ground to be staked out between body and soul which, in fugue state fashion, might provide the mist-woven manna capable of elevating purgatory to a passable simulacrum of heaven.

The book benefits and suffers from Johnson's experimental nature, which sees him using shifts in narrative voice and temporal linearity to compress, expand, and confound the reader's understanding of what is going on. The death of many of the main characters is either announced or strongly hinted at up front with the remaining story then the means for the untangling of the threads that the author so casually knots throughout the early stages. Indeed, Already Dead carries several interpretations herein: that this complex shoreside theater is one of ghosts; that a truly enlightened state can only be attained if one acknowledges this rubric as an existential fact; the terminal state of a significant part of the cast even as we are reading about their exploits upriver of time. This method can be effective, in that it forces one to adjust and readjust one's mental image of both what is transpiring and of the cast undertaking the actions therein, early judgements proven erroneous, prior anticipations wrenched forcefully out of position. However, it is also somewhat limiting, as that foreknowledge gained impacts the suspenseful enjoyment of watching tense sequences of events unfold, separated plot paths bending in towards a joining that has been unveiled some two hundred pages prior. There's also some nifty textual jiujitsu sprung from Nietzsche's Zarathustra, a self-willed striving against conventional morality that appears advanced and then veiled in Van Ness, shown to be circularly adaptable in Fairchild, coercive and manipulable in Yvonne, acceptably self-defeating in Navarro; and, in every case, Johnson portrays this self-impositioning as something potently charged but unwieldy, precariously straddling the line between purposeful desire and purplish insanity, a tool susceptible to demonic personas, incorporeal past-lives (or subconscious emanations) whose very immateriality, ravenous for controllable flesh, makes for an extremely perilous and unpredictable road to travel, especially in light of the monstrous interstitial eighteen-wheelers of Fate that thunder along its narrow lanes.

I suppose the thing to keep in mind is that Johnson is a poet, and his prose serves, above all, to unleash a flowing stream of the bizarre, damaged, and extreme to wash over the core of Anytown, USA, that we might observe how everything crumbles and falls apart, though it be bathed in the most sublimely pearlescent of light. And while he is unafraid of exploring the spiritual element of existence, such expeditions tend towards revealing little that is hale or whole or capable of any sustained uplift; you find confirmation of your own ravished anguish and failures and take note of the fact that hope is in very short supply. That's just how it goes, reader. You finish a Denis Johnson novel exhilarated by the writing and crushed by the people and events it is used to depict; left eager for more and out there on the very cutting edge of modernized despair, isolated and gauging the improbability of ever making it back home.