Second read. My god. One of my favourites. Just realised, I read it again almost exactly 2 years ago...how's that huh. ( )

"Angels" is an excellent novel. What sets this apart from a straightforward crime novel, like Johnson's "Nobody Move," are the poetic and metaphysical flourishes that accompany the character's experiences in the seedier corridors of the american experience. Johnson isn't sentimental with his realism and doesn't romanticize the trajectory of the down and out characters that populate "Angels."

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As the first novel in my attempt to reread this year, Angels was as riveting and provocative as the first time I read it. This time around, I appreciated Johnson's treatment of Jamie's psychotic break moreso than my first read. These struck me with more dread and terror the more I've deleved into reading literature on psychosis and I thought he had some visercal understanding of the fear and paranoia, in particular. ( )

ANGELS (1983) was Denis Johnson's first novel, but it's the fourth of his books that I've read, and, like the others, it leaves me wanting to read more from this ultra-talented writer. Like the stories in JESUS' SON, in ANGELS we are given characters who inhabit the fringes, the underbelly of society, embittered and addled by drugs and drink, abused women, neglected children, and petty criminals who stumble clumsily into major misdoings, sealing their fate. The Houston brothers, Bill Junior, James and Burris, along with Jamie Mays, a fugitive from an abusive marriage, are standard Johnson types. Jamie, fleeing cross-country from Oakland with her two small children, meets Bill Houston (ex-Navy, ex-con) on a Greyhound bus, and begins a sordid, and sometimes violent and brutal, odyssey through seedy hotels and bars in Pittsburgh and Chicago, finally ending up in Phoenix where a bank robbery by Bill and his brothers goes horribly wrong. Sordid? Yes, absolutely. But Johnson's talent is such that he makes you care about these tapped-out ruined lives. You begin to see them as sad, tarnished 'angels.' To paraphrase Willy Nelson, they are "angels flying WAY too close to the ground."

In trying to make comparisons, I thought of the hardboiled fiction of Jim Thompson and Charles Bukowski, but Johnson's writing is a cut above, more artful. And his doomed characters will linger a lot longer. Yes. This is indeed art. My highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

A stark bleak book about two people who are at the bottom of the food chain and their desperate drive to sink further. This is definitely not a cheery book, but is one incredibly well written story. ( )

This is the story of people who slip helplessly into their own worst nightmares. Jamie Mays has left her husband in a trailer park in Oakland, Calif. She's traveling with her two young daughters on a Greyhound bus when she meets Bill Houston. She is at first put off by his tattoos and silvered wraparound sunglasses. But loneliness and plain lack of energy throw them together, and they become lovers. After a terrifying time in Chicago, they head for Arizona. There they find white-hot afternoons, yards filled with junked cars, the sort of religion that simmers with demons and - most dangerous of all - Bill's family.
Angels is clearly not for everyone and I will say no more about the storyline. Some may be put off by its melodrama and nearly overwhelming sense of desperation. These characters can not be ignored. These are people. These are humans. And their ugly little misbegotten world is hardly the sort of thing you want to stumble into, let alone engage in, let alone be affected by, let alone be moved by. But I was affected and I was moved. ( )