SOURCE: Hitchings, Henry. Review of Already Dead, by Denis Johnson. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5024 (16 July 1999): 23.

In the following review of Already Dead, Hitchings commends Johnson's prose style, but finds shortcomings in the novel's philosophizing and unsympathetic characters.

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...