These potent tales are as tightly-controlled as their addled characters are chaotic
A Sacred Heart Jesus, an iconographic representation of a drug capsule, a light-damaged photograph of tract housing in middle America, and an epigraph from "Heroin" by the Velvet Underground. If there was ever a book designed to prove irresistible to my 17-year-old self, the Faber first edition of Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson is it. Along with Donald Barthelme's Forty Stories, bought the same summer, it was the one that most powerfully demonstrated to me the unique possibilities of the short story.
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