No, Already Dead is not a vampire or zombie book,despite the title. It is a strange, dark, scary and sometimes funny noir piece about the disintegration of an already mostly disintegrated life, that of a man surnamed Fairchild, and the bizarre cast of characters surrounding him (e.g., his acid-burnt-out-case brother William, violent drifter Van Ness, witch/healer(?) Yvonne, disfunctional pig-hunter hit men, giant-sized local phenomenon nicknamed Frankenstein, etc. Fairchild, son of a local property magnate, finds himself owing almost $100K to a local gangster and schemes to bump off his wife to use her insurance money. He hires Van Ness, after saving him from a suicide attempt, to do the job, but the plan erodes badly hereafter. Much of the narrative traces a local cop, Navarro, who is transplanted from East LA to the seemingly peaceful yet spooky and intense northern California coast. Navarro finds himself involved in the violence that follows the initial plot, and tries to sort it all out. Johnson is a gifted writer who has been a finalist for the Pulitzer. He writes with hallucinatory vividness and humor, but the overall tone of the book is dark, murky, spooky and disturbing.
For a review of the book from NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/31/reviews/970831.31gate01.html
For a review of the book from NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/31/reviews/970831.31gate01.html
