Oh, Denis Johnson! His writing is sublime - so many stand-out lines in this short book of short stories. This was his last book before he died in 2017. And so the lines, “It's plain to you that at the time I write this, I'm not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.” were like a punch in the heart.
But, I can't help judging it against Jesus's Son, and Train Dreams, and there was one story in this collection - the second story, I forget its name - that didn't work as well for me. So this is really 4.5 rounded up to 5.

I wonder if you're like me, if you collect and squirrel away in your soul certain odd moments when the Mystery winks at you, when you walk in your bathrobe and tasseled loafers, for instance, well out of your neighborhood and among a lot of closed shops, and you approach your very faint reflection ina. window with words above it. The sign said "Sky and Celery."

Closer, it read "Ski and Cyclery."

I headed home.

This is a difficult book to dissect without casting it in the light of Johnson's own death from liver cancer a little more than a year ago, in part because all five of these stories are preoccupied not only with the fragility of being but also with looking back on a patchwork life. There is very little forward momentum here, every narrator seemingly stuck in a purgatory of their on making and unable to look beyond the slowly enveloping chaos described by the aging writer in "Triumph Over the Grave." Some make attempts at redemption, like the letter scribbler in the collection's second piece, "The Starlight on Idaho," but never to any avail that we are allowed to experience. Whether they take the form of a genius poet dependent on a manic obsession to stay relevant ("Doppelganger, Poltergeist") or a hacky ad man (the titular story), these characters are stalled, and any development beyond the vague promise of a brighter future is simply too much to stomach. Johnson is right at home with these misanthropes and fuck-ups, and no doubt the opportunity of digesting a literary giant's last will and testament is reason enough for the rave reviews this volume has received. Still, there's only so far entropy will go, and I found these stories went down easy without leaving much of an impression. Never doubt that Johnson remained "cosmically funny" until the end; I simply found myself wanting more out of this great mind than meditations and anecdotes.

A wonderful collection; the final story in particular will stay with me.

Good writing, ugly characters.

Some of the stories were fantastic, introspective, and brilliantly written. Others fell incredibly flat for me, more like 1-2 stars.

An interesting collection of short stories that unfortunately wasn't for me.

Goddam but do we miss Denis Johnson.

There may be only one truly exceptional story here—“The Starlight on Idaho” which offers a series of letters (mostly unmailed) written by a young man rehabbing in a center that was once the disreputable Starlight Motel—but every story contains an abundance of flashes, a constellation of sentences that no one but Denis Johnson could ever have written.

I’ve had Tree of Smoke sitting fat and heavy on my shelf for years now. Dipping back into Johnson’s prose through these stories is the prod I needed to quit being a damn fool and pick that tome back up.