In Denis Johnson, Darkness Met Delight

Denis Johnson familiarized himself, early and often, with life’s bleakness. Between his roving childhood in Tokyo and Manila, a heroin addiction that ended in the mid ‘70s, and fabled drinking binges with his teacher Raymond Carver, the author’s confessed depravity—“I’m not right in the head,” he said in 2002—forms the moral axis on which his stories operate.

Like moths to a flame, or more appropriately, barflies to a long countertop, Johnson’s characters can’t resist self-sabotage for more than a few pages at a time. They’re both a reflection of the author’s hard living and a conduit for his seemingly endless supply of dark humor.

“Dear Satan,” broods a detoxing narrator in Johnson’s 2018 collection The Largesse, “I did not enjoy it at your Jamboree last night.”