Denis Johnson obituary

In novels, stories, plays and poems, Denis Johnson, who has died of liver cancer aged 67, wrote about characters best described as fallen angels. Life beset them with problems and they responded by taking to drugs or crime, or going on the road, each effort to cope creating new dilemmas. His best known work, Jesus’ Son (1992), is a short-story collection linked by its narrator, known only by the name others call him, Fuckhead. Bill Houston, the protagonist who is executed in Angels (1983), his first novel, reappears as his younger self in Johnson’s most successful novel, the sprawling Vietnam tale Tree of Smoke (2007), which won the US National Book award.

“What I write about,” Johnson said, “is the dilemma of living in a fallen world, and asking why it is like this if there’s supposed to be a god.”