In Jesus’ Son, his first collection of stories, Denis Johnson records how far a soul can run from God and still be hounded by Jesus. His once-named narrator (“Fuckhead”) wanders purposeless and with little past, bent on burning out his self-awareness through drugs and alcohol. Yet he cannot escape being human — human with a religious subconscious that makes his life hell.

Johnson came to short stories after finishing two poetry collections and four novels: Angels, Fiskadoro, The Stars at Noon, and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man. He seems to have hit his stride in this shorter form, combining the best of both genres: The creativity and language leaps (e.g. “I knew every raindrop by its name”) of poetry, and the character, structure, plot, and dialogue of novels. Jesus’ Son draws its inspiration from Lou Reed’s “Heroin”: “When I’m rushing on my run / And I feel just like Jesus’ son…” Elsewhere in the song, Reed sings, “Thank God that I’m not aware / Thank God that I just don’t care…. I want to try for the Kingdom if I can / Cause it makes me feel like I’m a man.” Johnson’s narrator is a failure as a man, but his stories are funny and spellbinding, full of surprises.

Near the end of “Two Men,” Fuckhead pushes a woman’s face into a rug and presses a gun against her temple. His ominous last lines to her end the story: “I don’t care. You’re going to be sorry.” They reveal much. Ostensibly he doesn’t care that the man he seeks (the woman’s lover) has fled, but he is also going to make the woman sorry because he doesn’t care, has lost his ability to care.

In an earlier scene, his fear of a man who may be seeking revenge on him takes on religious dimensions:

“What is it?” Richard said as I got in.

Headlights came around the corner. A spasm ran through me so hard it shook the car.

“Jesus,” I said. The interior filled up with light so that for two seconds you could have read a book.

A few lines later Richard says,

“Maybe he forgives you.”

“Oh God, if he does, then we’re comrades and so on, forever . . . All I’m asking is just punish me and get it over with.”

A similar, oft-quoted scene occurs in “Emergency” (honored along with “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” in The Best American Short Stories). Fuckhead and his friend stumble across the parking lot of a drive-in theater, though Fuckhead thinks its a cemetery, mistaking the speaker mounts for grave markers.

On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity. The sight of them cut through my heart and down the knuckles of my spine, and if there’d been anything in my bowels I would have messed my pants from fear.

Guilty, God-haunted, Fuckhead expects nothing less than the Second Coming.

One of the book’s unusual achievements is to subvert the convention that the main character initiates action leading to change. These stories are about passivity, the inability to change. Yet the narrator is likeable because, for all his guilt, he seems innocent in a childlike way. His humor is that of a boy who can’t be serious. We identify with him in his discomfort at being human; we pity him for the lengths he goes to shun it.

Drugs and Jesus dominate these stories: drugs directly, Jesus indirectly. In “Happy Hour,” Jesus is drugs. The narrator buys a huge hallucinogen that he thinks must be for horses. He insists nobody could swallow it, but he does. “Look at it! It’s like an egg. It’s like an Easter thing.” His bestial descent is equated with Christ’s resurrection. By the last story, “Beverly Home,” our hero has achieved a kind of peace. As an orderly at a hospital for the aged, he is paid to touch people. A woman in a wheelchair screams “Lord? Lord?” and he puts his hands in her hair. He is Jesus. He has redeemed himself.

A shorter version of this review appeared in Harvard Review Number Five, Fall 1993.