This is a big, sprawling West Coast sort of a mess. You can almost smell the pot smoke wafting out from between the pages. The characters and situations are larger and more colorful than life, you know, like how things look when you've got a righteous buzz on. Yes, it's confusing at times. Yes, it could be tighter. But in true DJ style, Already Dead's surface craziness mask an fascinating look at the connection between the spiritual and the hedonistic. ( )

Overdoes the gothic and sinister feel of the california coast around point arena and gualala. ( )

Rarely does one encounter fiction which transports the reader completely outside themselves, immersing them in vividly captured landscapes of Redwoods & rolling ridges rising out of hazy, distant Pacific; it's as if we're right there ourselves, a character, viewing through another's eyes the Lost Coast of Northern California. Each time I opened Already Dead, I forgot about my life and what I had been or was about to be doing. I was transfixed in the reading, completely in the moment, page by page, word by word. I wasn't reading so much as going out-of-body, watching events transpire around me. No, I'm not stoned on incense or marijuana man, like so many of the ruined lives in Already Dead. High art, like Already Dead, transports its audience outside themselves, into trippy realities, and Denis Johnson, poet, novelist, spiritualist, is high art's medium. His talent tramsports our lives into lives surrealy interweaved with landscapes [this review is under construction] -- , places where we get pleasantly lost, where realities blend with the surreal so that the former becomes indecipherable from the latter, and new perspectives, world views are forged. I could blather on about the plot, the much praised poetic language, how the Lost Coast of California's a perfect metaphor for the lives Johnson describes -- and these are all indeed vital elements worthy of discussion and analysis (and they're discussed elsewhere here in LT) -- but these elements pale in impact to what Already Dead elicits out of its more sympathetic readers: an almost altered state of consciousness; a state of what amounts to Zen meditation; spiritual transcendence. I've never considered myself a spiritual/mystical person, but I''ve discovered that in reading Denis Johnson and Already Dead, I may be more the mystic than I ever realized. ( )

With language that is luminous at times, Johnson contrasts the beauty of coastal Northern California with the substance and rage induced behavior of some inhabitants. Although not really a crime novel there is plenty of crime to go around. Johnson mostly concerns himself with the demons in his characters and how most of them unsuccessfully attempt to keep them at bay, or not. ( )

Welcome to the Hotel California …

Johnson must not think much of Northern Californians, the entire cast of Already Dead is misogynistic, drug addled, possessed by demons, or just flat-out insane. That’s not to say that it’s not an enjoyable read, his use of language is often stunning, it’s just that there isn’t anyone in the book to root for. Halfway through the 435-page novel, I was hoping a tidal wave would just sweep all of them out into the Pacific Ocean. And yet …

And yet I just kept reading. ( )