Wandering, ruin, and small mercy — the trail has plenty of all three.
Jesus' Son
A drifting addict narrates eleven linked stories in which car crashes, hospital shifts, and chance encounters acquire the force of visions.
173g
Weighs the same as Camp Sandals + Lip Balm
- Lightweight
- Carries You Away
- Fiction (stories)
Denis Johnson published Jesus' Son in 1992: eleven linked stories narrated by a wrecked young man drifting through the Midwest on drugs and bad luck, told in prose as spare as a ghost town. There's a whiff of the Beats here as Johnson writes about the absolute addicts, thieves, lost souls—but does so with a raw, hallucinatory poetry that feels close to holy. It is brutal, beautiful, and utterly unforgettable. Not a trail book exactly — but it's about wandering, ruin, and small mercy, which the trail has plenty of. It weighs almost nothing and lands like a truck.
Field notes
In 1972, Johnson survived a horrific car crash while hitchhiking through Missouri. Nearly twenty years later, it became the collection's opening story. When the surviving family revisited the story fifty years after the accident, they revealed one very large discrepancy: the human blood Johnson remembered raining down inside the car was actually taco sauce from a shattered container. Johnson began writing these stories after getting sober, adopting the voice of an older man piecing together his drug-addled youth. The distance between what happened and what he remembered became his great artistic resource: ordinary catastrophe transformed by a mind that could no longer distinguish revelation from hallucination.