An Introduction

by Brian Evenson

I think it was Stephen Graham Jones who first mentioned Jeremy Robert Johnson to me, seven or eight years ago now. Shortly after, I saw a copy of Extinction Journals in a bookstore and picked it up and read the first line—“The cockroaches took several hours to eat the President.”—and thought, “What the . . . ?!?” A few paragraphs later, as things really got zany (with, among other things, radiation protective suits made out of Twinkies and sewn-together cockroaches), I decided to buy the book.

In Johnson’s world, anything can happen. The most crazed, twisted ideas are given life, pursued to their bitter limit. People have their lips removed in the name of beauty, Tibetan monks sing the human race into death, a boy slits open his own stomach just out of curiosity, a man’s body billows out in an explosion of tiny insects. Straight-edge punks might get high on intense violence, even murder, or a treehugger might find more in the crown of a redwood than she bargained for, or a man might discover that a robbery is just the first gambit in a game that will lead to his own destruction, a game whose rules he can’t begin to understand. One story even opens, “You could bite off Todd’s nose,” and it becomes quickly clear that if Jeremy Robert Johnson hasn’t actually bitten off someone’s (Todd’s?) nose, he’s spent a fair amount of time thinking about what that actually might be like, and he’s kindly willing to share the fruits of that knowledge with you, the reader. Beginning with absurd premises that often swerve into some serious darkness, reading Johnson is a little like believing you’re at a GWAR show and in on the joke, and instead suddenly finding yourself a participant in Gorgoroth’s Black Mass.

But it’s more than that, since Johnson can shift gears and genres between and within stories, keeping you always a little off balance, going from dark to comic, from Twilight Zone-style horror to contemporary noir to something almost Lovecraftian and back again. The point is, you never quite know where you’re going to go in a Jeremy Robert Johnson story, and even when you get a glimmer of where you’re heading, you may still not quite believe it. What makes Johnson so interesting is that once he takes on a premise, no matter how absurd it is to begin with, he treats it seriously. He rushes forward with the concept, often at a dizzying pace, leaving you as a reader wildly trying to find something to hold on to. These stories can be uncomfortable, difficult, unflinching, but they’re also always entertaining. Johnson writes with an energy that propels you through some very dark spaces indeed and into something profoundly unsettling but nonetheless human.

One of the great things going on with writers working on the edge of several different genres, with writers simultaneously able to overlay the codes of different ways of reading into their work—providing multiple paths through a book and multiple deliberate dead ends that force you to shift code sets along the way—is that they’re both able to offer readers the satisfactions of those genres and to give them something more: the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Johnson’s work rewards readers who read widely, who like different genres, and who think about connections across genres. The kinds of readers who are willing to stand on the side of the literary highway and thumb down whatever vehicle comes by, who are willing to take more chances than the average reader.

It’ll be a wild ride, but after a little shaking you’ll get to your destination, and be able to get out unharmed, mostly, and it’ll still be you. Or at least someone who looks and acts like you. Well, someone who will be able to pass for you in most circumstances. Honestly, the real you probably won’t even be missed.