Denis Johnson is a writer's writer---everyone who has an MFA seems to have read him, but the general reading public remains mostly unaware of his existence. Like most of these writers, he writes lyrical, moving prose. The kind of writing that brings you a digestible image in an unexpected, beautiful way. In Nobody Move he uses that prose skill to deliver a pulp crime story.

Consider this passage: Sally stood upright on the grave and whirled like an eerie batter at home plate, and Luntz watched the pickaxe drifting toward him until the top of the crescent struck him in the belly. He doubled, sat on his ass, and said, "What?" as the back of his head hit the ground. Sally leapt onto him and straddled Luntz's midriff and got his fingers tight around Luntz's throat and locked his arms straight, and Luntz felt him bearing down. Luntz's vision turned a brilliant brown, then a mellow purple, then a beautiful color he'd never seen before in which he had everything he needed and all the time in the world to decide what came next. He gripped the wrists of the hands choking him and removed the hands as easily as if he were taking off a sports jacket and held them out at arms length while Sally breathed and Sally's spit dripped down into his face.

Johnson describes two guys beating the shit out of each other with an eye for the beauty lurking just below the surface, the crescent of the pickaxe and the brilliant brown. He displays a care for revealing unnoticed beauty usually reserved for scenes involving sunsets and flowers and sighs. Like Nabokov if Nabokov wrote about guys who owe money to the mob.

He also writes a lot of sex scenes, with the kind of detail only a really horny guy can muster. And, of course, with the same poetic style.