SOURCE: Sutherland, John. “Holy Drunkalogs.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4709 (2 July 1993): 23.

In the following positive review, Sutherland examines Johnson's prose in Jesus' Son.

Denis Johnson's title is taken from Lou Reed's song “Heroin”—“When I'm rushing on my run / And I feel just like Jesus' Son.” What follows is a bundle of short stories all of which revolve obsessively around drugs and booze. Stylistically, Johnson comes across as fourth-generation Beat, following the substance-abuse line that descends from Kerouac, through Burroughs and Charles Bukowski to the films of Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho). The eleven stories in Jesus' Son are narrated by a nameless young addict who drifts from Chicago, to Iowa, to Seattle (where he seems happiest) to Arizona. Sometimes he works as an orderly in the Emergency Room of a hospital—where he and a disorderly buddy raid the pharmacy for drugs. Sometimes he...