Junk-sick, Broke and Completely Alone, in a Land of Bad Intentions 
 I've gone through three copies of 'Jesus' Son', reading it like a prayer-book, though it's nothing of the kind. There's a sadness living in every sentence, and it doesn't really have any suggestions for better living, beyond a painfully obvious cautionary tale. Drugs are bad, m'kay? 
 It's more like a manual for poetic self-immolation... burning yourself down to the foundation-stones and finding one beautiful thing in the ashes. Even if it's something cheap and common, it assumes a spiritual density simply by escaping the flames, and a malleability that allows it to be shaped and worked into something vaguely redemptive. 
 Why the fuck am I writing like Denis Johnson, you ask? Or... a Denis Johnson that's been Google translated into Urdu and back into English? Well... it's that kind of book -- one that moves into your head and makes itself comfortable. His writing has the hard-eyed toughness of Chandler, but with a kind of unabashed sensitivity that Chandler would never expose... imagine Dashiell Hammett writing poetry, and imagine yourself liking it. It's Bogart in drag, or a concert pianist with the broken hands of a boxer. 
 "And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person's life on this earth. I don't mean that we all end up dead, that's not the great pity. I mean that he couldn't tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn't tell him what was real." 
 See? That sort of thing. In case you're not familiar with The Velvet Underground, the title comes from one of Lou Reed's classic lines in 'Heroin'. It's about heroin. ;-) 
 Denis Johnson's skills as a short story writer, poet, and novelist all coalesced with 'Jesus' Son', to produce a sad, funny and frightening little masterpiece. It's not really even a novella; more of a collection of short stories that add up to something related to a novella. Loosely inspired by Johnson's own experiences, the main character - Fuckhead -- introduces himself with a story of hitch-hiking in the rain. He's feeling burnt out and edgy after taking mystery pills from a travelling salesman... never a good idea, but his name is Fuckhead. He doesn't do anything the right way. When a family is nice enough to stop and let a drenched stranger into their car, he knows that it's going to end in tragedy, but he gets in anyway...'They said they'd take me all the way.' 
 Fuckhead's wanderings through the USA of the 1970's are always told from the anamorphic perspectives of a compromised mind, pleasantly poisoned with all manner of chemical. Junkies finding love in motel rooms. Drug-dealers half-heartedly murdering each other in a Midwestern farmhouse. A hospital clerk and orderly way too high for anything that comes through the Emergency Room doors. Rehab. Johnson presents skewed characters and situations that seem to operate according to the inscrutable mechanisms of dream and nightmare. Like Dundun, for instance, about whom I can say little. The narrator can say a few words, though; narrators do that: 
 "Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that." 
 Yeah, that's Dundun. That's also perfect casting. 
 Alison Maclean's adaptation of 'Jesus' Son' is one of the best novel-to-film translations I've seen, along with 'No Country For Old Men' and the big screen incarnations of the aforementioned Chandler and Hammett. The performances are thoroughly fucking brilliant, but Michael Shannon's portrayal of Dundun was unforgettable. 
 Other writers could work a decade, write a thousand pages, and not create a fraction of the intensity and emotional dissonance that Johnson scribbles into being. And his characters... they crawl off the paper and bury themselves in the soft grey folds of your brain, like memories that you've bought and paid for by living them. Jesus, that sounds absolutely fucking horrid. It's actually a good thing. 
 "Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine." 
 -- Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son 
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