One of those nights when the last sound of a passing truck disappears, as its doped up driver struggles to remain conscious and follow that strange, winding line that swaggers in the midle of the road. The night when phones ring, and on the other side of the wire, voices of long forgotten people, long despised friends and lost memories.Cries and tears with no laughter.The night when even Death sleeps, with its tool deserted along the barn wall. In one such night, into a provincial hospital where the staff steals drugs from the medicine locker intending to swallow them and thus drift into the blessed mists of a doped up world, walks in a man with a hunting knife stabbed into his left eye. He says his wife caught him looking into the appartment of the neighbour across the street and then decided to punish him, and so now he is here, unsure what to do next. The hospital is located some three blocks from his appartment so he figured, why not stop by?... The blade went in all the way to the brain, and the main ophthalmologist, brain surgeon and anestheziologist are on vacation and have no intention to appear in this strange night and this strange place. We lose sight of the man as he disappears around the corner of a six-story building, leisurly strolling around town, happy he got away with only so much as a Band-Aid over his eye. Just like in those cartoons we enjoyed so much when we were kids.

For the past few moment you were in the world of Denis Johnson. In the world of murderers, lunatics, alcoholics, weekend-jounkeys and failed poets that roam the streets and stop strange cars along dimly lit roads. It's as if Bukowski or Hunter S. Thompson appeared in person, wondering the pages in search for the meaning of life. But still, it's like something even more sinister crawls along theses pages. Without remorse, without false bautification, a diverse grotesque occasionaly also know as life. Husbands and wives in their early twenties, with chidren that haven't started to talk yet but have already witnessed brutal beatings. Failed loves and loves of failures. A tanlgled, inextricable ball of wire, without Alexander the great to cut the knot, or at leat make things bearable…           

And now, as I write these lines, I feel like my memory is calling upon such impressions. I feel like I've witnessed dozens of ugly and hopeless lives. It seems like each skillfully written page holds a cry for help, written in invisible dwarven runes. And thus again we come to the issue of generational literature…     

While Europe was coming to terms with ghosts from the past, America fled the monsters of the present. Even though this escape often turned into a miserable attempt of coexistence. Pointing a finger into a festering wound is a favorite sport of many story-tellers, but it takes a great deal of skill, or talent if you will, not to spread the infection on other body parts. The line is thin between the aware grotesque and the grotesque that is just that, an effective offer of forbidden pleasures to the uniterested public that devours such works and then immedately goes on to something else, possibly even darker. However, Johnson balances quite well between the two worlds, and the existence of his characters is so grotesque that we can even call it hyper-realistic, the prose that ponders, or better, declares the entire human history through several short destinies that rush quickly through the pages of this book.      

The only thing hat can be held against this book is its brevity. Johnson seems to have long ago realized that which I will never learn, that has long become a proverb – it'd doesn't matter how much, but how well. As much as I respect such thinking, I can't but feel sorry to exit Johnson's world. Human sickness holds such magical appeal that it is almost impossible to resist.           

Therefore it's not strange that the late american Nobel prize winner Saul Bellow pointed Johnson out as one of the great writers of the present. Without wars or unattainable mountain peeks, Johnson does today what Hemingway once did – immerses the reader without mercy into a world that is no different from the one that he wanted to escape from to begin with. This shoch of failed metamorphosis is enough to waken the most sleepy convolutions and the most discontented observers.          

It is important not to give into the dark defetism of the protagonists. The joy for life should not become demode or turn into a molting ghost of romantic times. Whether you take Aristotel or Mill for ethical guidelines, Johnson's book will break your image (if you ever had one!) of a just and righteous world, or even the possibility of the existance of the world as such.           

Perhaps everything is not so dark and perhaps Johnson is simply toying with his audience. As always, it is the reading that matters, and therefore, people – read! And write!