Blurb

American master Denis Johnson’s nationally bestselling collection of blistering and indelible tales about America’s outcasts and wanderers.

Denis Johnson’s now classic story collection Jesus’ Son chronicles a wild netherworld of addicts and lost souls, a violent and disordered landscape that encompasses every extreme of American culture. These are stories of transcendence and spiraling grief, of hallucinations and glories, of getting lost and found and lost again. The insights and careening energy in Jesus’ Son have earned the book a place of its own among the classics of twentieth-century American literature. It was adapted into a critically-praised film in 1999.

Review

Jesus’ Son was included with my copy of Train Dreams, also by Johnson; so I read them back-to-back. Both were time well spent, but if I had to choose one over the other, I would take Jesus’ Son.

In my review of Train Dreams, I noted the writing was simple, but it was also about a simple man. This writing, while also simple in style, had significantly more wit. While a collection of short stories, they are mostly centered around an addict, known in the majority of the stories as Fuckhead. Fuckhead is a complicated man masked as a simple degenerate. While these stories are a collection of debauchery, there is line after line within them that are beautifully philosophical if not haunting. Reading this book, I would constantly come across a line that had me thinking “I could build a song around that line”. I should have written those lines down as I was reading them.

The crime is petty. The stories are not. Highly recommend.