The California Curse

Already Dead - A California Gothic
by Denis Johnson

It took me ten years to read this book.
It wasn’t that it was difficult to read, or boring. I didn’t get distracted, or lose interest. To be perfectly honest, it scared me. And there was no logical reason for it. But there was something about it that just hit so close to home, both physically and emotionally, that I couldn’t get farther than the first few chapters before I’d put it down, shaken in a way I couldn’t fully articulate. It wasn’t until I moved to the other side of the country, as far as humanly possible from the fog shrouded edge of the world where I was born, that I could finally finish it. I’m glad I did, but it still haunts me.
As complex as Johnson’s novel is, as many other subjects as it addresses in its sprawling, sinuous 500 pages, it’s really about California, about its landscape, its aura, its allure, its promise, its deadlocked residents, their dreams and nightmares.

“For three generations my family has belonged to Northern California, living in the shadow of its ways - nature’s big moves, the colossal, twisted gestures of cypresses along the bluffs… But it’s also a land of interminable rains, baffling droughts, and, in July and August, the thick cloying fog banks. For twenty-one successive days they clung to the North Coast this summer, like the American Dream plowed up against the freezing sea.”

It’s hard for me to talk about this book impersonally, hard to separate the subject of the book from the effect it had on me, coming at the time it did in my life. Coming at a time when I had divorced myself from California, flippantly declaring its hold on me to be null and void, turning my back on America’s final destination, the golden dream at the end of the road.
I knew for the first time, reading this novel I’d been afraid of so long, that I would go back.
Because we all go back. For those of us born there, California carries with it a life sentence. It’s a strange thing to be born into a place that the rest of the world dreams of. It breeds a unique type of resentment, a need for escape. It takes perspective to accept the curse that holds you.

So this is a book about that dream, that nightmare, that curse.
It’s focus, like most of Johnson’s fiction, is on the down and out, people who are, in one way or another, separated, from society at large, from reality, from themselves. And in the desolate stretch of Mendocino County coastline between Gualala and Point Arena, the land of new age gurus, derelict hippies, pot growers and loggers, Johnson truly found his muse.
Already Dead, on it’s face, is classic noir, a twisted little murder plot gone terribly wrong, but it’s really the setting that elevates it to something more. The characters are all products of the land, products of isolation and failed dreams in a perpetual, foggy stasis. Everyone is lost, doomed to their fates, and all you can do, as a reader, is watch it all collapse.
But this is also a novel filled with a strange sense of wonder, tiny miracles and retributions, and it’s this aspect that carries you through, as well as the pure hypnotic beauty of the writing. There are so many turns, so many surprises both affirming and terrifying, and to give too much away would be unfair to any potential reader. So I will leave you instead with this:

“The man John who wrote the Bible’s last book - on the isle of Patmos he envisioned just this, smoke flooding out of God’s censer and a third of the moon and sun and stars darkened and a burning mountain cast into the sea and turning a third of the water to blood: envisioned coastal California in the evening…”