Denis Johnson's Already Dead is the meandering, bleakly humorous story of a society in decay, a noirish portrait of the narcotized survivors of the American West Coast. In this twisted, drug-addled, depressive stratum of existence, Johnson's characters are freaks and loners, enslaved by their obsessions. One of them declares that “you can do anything, in a world you don't believe in”; their eternal odyssey is an exploration of the possible, or an adventure in the suspension of belief. At the heart of the narrative there is a savage revenge plot, but it is hard to speak of plot or narrative centre in any orthodox sense; the lives of burnt-out drug users are a subject unconducive to straight lines and orderly progression, and the novel's pages brim with hippie lore and karmic digressions, dislocated dialogue and fractured sensibility. The result is a loose but never incoherent story, best understood as a mixture of tribute and satire.

Johnson's writing does not wear conspicuous influences, but his tale resonates with tones reminiscent of Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy and Robert Stone. His prose possesses an uncannily compressive poetry. The sea booms with “serrated thunder”; a waking sleeper lies in bed “like a page torn in the middle of a word.” There is much in this vein—much that makes an ugly story strangely beautiful. In general, however, Already Dead is unforgiving. Johnson ploughs bushels of stodgy philosophy into the novel; there is too much undigested Nietzsche, too much questing after metaphysical verities. It is hard not to admire the skill in individual sentences and the passionate precision with which the author has observed the world he reproduces, but sympathy is never quite engaged by his characters and their patter of dark-edged uncertainties.