Already Dead: A California Gothic

Already Dead: A California Gothic by Johnson, Denis. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780060187378.

For three generations Fairchilds family has owned miles of coastal Northern California, a region to whose grandness, he believes, the best people are drawn. But its also a land of interminable rains, puzzling droughts, and cloying fog-banks. And some of its fine people have become, in Fairchilds eyes, "isolated minds bending around tightly to feed on themselves." These are his people - the burnouts and mystics, the bikers and surfers, the witches and warlocks. Into this world comes Carl Van Ness, a man bent on suicide who thinks of himself as "already dead," drifting along the coast until he finds this strange community waiting for him. Then he collides with Nelson Fairchild. The pacts Fairchild makes - first with criminal associates, later with the would-be suicide, finally with a demon - all have to be paid for. The lengths to which hes willing to go ultimately become the depths to which he must sink before hes ready to confront himself. And his journey leads readers into the labyrinth of Northern Californias demimonde.