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.