Already Dead by Denis Johnson
Published 1997 · 149,913 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Noir, Philosophical Fiction
How hard is Already Dead to read?
Already Dead scores 65 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Johnson draws on a distinctive lexical range: oneiromancy, sinsemilla, bushido, tetrahydrocannabinol, and philosophical proper nouns (Wittgenstein, Spinoza, Descartes) sit alongside California coastal counterculture vernacular and nautical terms. The vocabulary is literary and specific without reaching invented or archaic obscurity. Readers encounter unfamiliar terms regularly but context and rhythm carry them through—richer than The Great Gatsby, well below Gravity's Rainbow's jargon density.
- Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
- The novel alternates between modes: third-person chapters (Van Ness, Frankenstein) tend toward controlled, punchy sentences, while Nelson Fairchild's first-person narration runs to long, comma-laden clauses studded with dashes and parenthetical asides—'Melissa—your eyes: the gravities and winds across those skies…' Johnson's syntax is demanding but navigable, with a fondness for sudden tonal pivots from philosophical digression back to hard declarative statement. Closer to Lolita than to Faulkner's thousand-word sentences.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Johnson embeds extended philosophical and spiritual digressions inside a hard-boiled plot: Nelson meditates on Descartes resting on a feather, the forest as the Jungian unconscious, and Buddhism's river-as-everywhere-at-once while evading men sent to kill him. Frankenstein delivers sustained interior monologue on the nature of language and symbol. These passages are genuinely metaphysical, not mere decoration, elevating abstraction well above genre noir while remaining more earthbound than Beckett.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Three main POV characters with interlocking plots (Van Ness's terminal illness pilgrimage, Frankenstein's psychotic recovery, Nelson's murder conspiracy), embedded local legends (the Coast Silky, the Wishing Tree parable), Gulf War context, California marijuana law, and philosophical asides create a layered reading experience. The density is substantial but not overwhelming—Johnson's voice is digressive rather than encyclopedic.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- The novel rotates through three unreliable perspectives without clear signals when POV shifts occur. Nelson is an acknowledged self-deceiver, Frankenstein cannot distinguish psychotic hallucination from reality ('ninety percent of this is psycho bullshit—but ten percent of it is real'), and Van Ness exists half inside a death-dream. Readers must infer which perceptions to trust and assemble character relationships across non-adjacent date-stamped sections.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- Johnson saturates the Northern California landscape with symbolic freight: fog blurs moral clarity; Frankenstein's forge represents transformation through destruction; the pond into which the mysterious figure walks is simultaneously baptism, suicide, and harrowing of hell; the redwood forest explicitly stands for the unconscious. The Coast Silky legend—a sailor who skinned a seal and lost his human identity—functions as a structural emblem for the novel's divided characters. These symbols are worked organically into the narrative rather than schematically.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Nelson's first-person narration operates at a mordant, self-aware ironic distance—he parodies California-speak ('everything's okay or neat'), mocks his own romantic delusions, and acknowledges his corruption while wallowing in it. Johnson's irony is earthy and darkly comic rather than postmodern: the gap between what Nelson says and what he means is wide, but the novel doesn't require the constant recalibration of Nabokov or Pale Fire.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- The date-stamped structure promises a chronicle but delivers ambiguity: Frankenstein's 'entities' may or may not be real, Van Ness's fate beyond his stated forty-eight hours is deferred, and Nelson's murderous schemes remain unrealized across the early sections. Johnson consistently refuses to resolve the boundary between paranoia and genuine threat, between spiritual vision and madness. The novel's ending leaves Nelson's fate and the nature of several apparitions unresolved.
- Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
- The novel deploys three POV characters (Van Ness in third person, Frankenstein in third person, Nelson Fairchild in first person) whose sections are date-stamped but whose timelines overlap and intersect unpredictably. Embedded within these are folk legends (the Coast Silky), an Eastern parable (the Wishing Tree), and Johnson's characteristic tonal gear-shifts between crime thriller, lyric landscape writing, and philosophical meditation. More complex than linear multi-plotline fiction, stopping short of radical formal experiment.
How Already Dead is regarded
Already Dead holds a literary regard score of 52 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.