[4][5][6] Eva Hoffman of The New York Times, confirming Fiskadoro's post-apocalyptic pedigree, writes: [T]he poet and novelist Denis Johnson attempts something much more daring and provocative.

But his startlingly original book is an examination of the cataclysmic imagination, a parable of apocalypse that is always present and precedes redemption in a cycle of death and birth, forgetting and remembering.

[10]Kakutani reprises her praise for the novel in 2017: "Plots in Mr. Johnson's books tend to be tangled, melodramatic affairs—often highly indebted to famous works by Conrad, Graham Greene and Robert Stone—in his lesser books...his writing can devolve into portentous philosophizing, larded with New Age and Nietzschean intonations...But in his masterworks—[among them] Fiskadoro...Johnson's incandescent language channels his characters' desperation.

It's a troubled land, staggering from wretched excess and aching losses, a country where dreams have often slipped into out-and-out delusions, and people hunger for deliverance, if only in the person of a half-baked messiah.

Reason is in short supply here, and grifters and con men peddling conspiracy thinking and fake news abound; families are often fragmented or nonexistent; and primal, Darwinian urges have replaced the rule of law.