SOURCE: Review of Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson. Kirkus Reviews 60, no. 19 (1 October 1992): 1206-07.

In the following review of Jesus' Son, the anonymous critic maintains that “Johnson's beautifully damned stories sing with divine poetry, all the while bludgeoning us with existential reality.”

Johnson (Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, 1991; Fiskadoro, 1985 etc.) brings together eleven down-and-out stories [in Jesus' Son] linked by their disagreeable narrator—a lowlife of mythic proportions who abuses drugs, booze, and people with reckless indifference. But this eventually recovering slacker reveals in these deceptively thin tales a psyche so tormented and complex that we allow him his bleak redemption.

Gobbling whatever drugs he can, the nameless narrator witnesses a fatal car wreck while hitchhiking and experiences a strange euphoria. His highs can be sharp, edgy, and intense, resulting in casual violence and emotional disconnectedness (“Dundun”); or sluggish, as he threatens to nod out before our eyes. At...