[In the following review, Malin praises Already Dead, complimenting Johnson's vision of California culture.]

The two main characters—who are curious doubles—are Nelson Fairchild, Jr. and Carl Van Ness. Both are half-alive, ghostly “shades”; they are drawn to each other because they are “doomed.” There is, perhaps, a sexual attraction, but they understand their greater need to violate morality, their murderous and/or suicidal urges. They are, in Leonard Cohen's wonderful phrase, “beautiful losers.”

Words tend to inspire a sense of dread, awe, other universes that are filled with magical transformations and transgressions. Fairchild, who longs to kill his father and wife, thinks aloud: “When you die, your consciousness blanks out, but it resumes eons later, when the history of molecules has been revised enough to preclude your death due to those particular circumstances: the bullet hits your brain in this world, but in a later one merely tickles your earlobe. You die in one universe and yet in another go on without a hitch.” The entire novel tests the limits of thresholds (psychological, religious, linguistic); it explores the “brink of intelligibility.”

Johnson's California is, perhaps, a stranger land than Pynchon's Vineland; it is a miraculous realm, another “universe” in which transubstantiations occur so suddenly that we are never sure whether the big earthquake will occur. Maybe Johnson believes it is occurring right now.