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May 07, 2015lukasevansherman rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
"Late that day Michael pointed at the hazy distance and claimed he saw the hills of his childhood, the Happy Mountains, called by the missionary James Hannington, in frustration and disgust, the Laughing Monsters. . ." Denis Johnson favors characters who live on the outskirts of society ("Jesus' Son," "Angels") or Americans adrift in hostile foreign countries that that don't understand ("The Stars at Noon," his Vietnam opus "Tree of Smoke"). His latest book features the latter, even if the lead character claims to be Scandinavian. As DeLillo mines the paranoid territories that were once the province of espionage novels, so Johnson maps the post-9/11 land (in this case Sierra Leone) that will be familiar to readers of Greene and Conrad. He writes in a deceptively flat manner, which can be off putting and his characters, at least in this book, are equally flat. I don't think he's ever topped the interconnected stories of "Jesus' Son," but I'll still read anything he writes.