This high-suspense tale offer a more convincing portrait of amoral intelligence agents and the havoc they wreak than almost any journalistic account of Third World skullduggery

For all its chaos and complexity, The Laughing Monsters is one of Johnson’s most disciplined efforts

This echoes of Graham Greene’s bleak cynicism and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it’s a gripping romp through a world of corruption, government interference, big business manipulation and all sorts of other shenanigans to boot

It has an irresistible sense of hopelessness

The Laughing Monsters is part espionage thriller and part screwball comedy, and it straddles those far-flung genres with more grace than you might think possible

Short, sharp-edged and often very funny novel

The moral ambiguity, corruption and exploitation that the author gradually reveals on the ground in modern Africa is breathtaking, without ever being preachy or didactic

Refreshingly, The Laughing Monsters mostly rejects the passé heroics and moral clarity of traditional James Bond-style thrillers for something more complicated. It is never a case of mission accomplished…but that only adds to the intrigue

Complex and disquieting

The Laughing Monsters…walks in the steps of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter.

Heart of Darkness mixed with espionage – madness seeps into the fibre of the story.

Johnson's tenth novel is a stunner: the story of Roland Nair, a rogue intelligence agent looking to make a big score in Sierra Leone amid the detritus and chaos of the post-war-on-terrorism world. Johnson's sentences are always brilliant, but it is in the interstices, the gray areas of the story, that he really excels."

National Book Award winner Denis Johnson has brilliantly plumbed the mystical and the macabre in such works as Tree of Smoke and his instant classic Jesus’ Son. The Laughing Monsters delivers a more commercial, post-9/11 tale of intrigue, deception, romance, and misadventure set in West Africa without losing Johnson’s essentially poetic drive . . . With each twist, Johnson deftly ups the stakes while adding to the cavalcade of entrepreneurs, assassins, seers, and smugglers that populate the book, tuning us in to the roiling political realities and cultural complexities of Africa today . . . This visionary novel is always falling together, never apart. That’s Johnson.

And for his next trick, Johnson delivers a taut, Conrad-by-way-of-Chandler tale about a spy who gets too close to the man he's shadowing in Africa . . . As in any good double-agent story, Johnson obscures whose side Roland is really on, and Roland himself hardly knows the answer either: Befogged by frustrations and bureaucracy, his lust for Davidia and simple greed, he slips deeper into violence and disconnection. Johnson expertly maintains the heart-of-darkness mood . . . his antihero's story is an intriguing metaphor for [post-9/11 lawlessness]

A dangerously good thriller

This thriller gets under your skin and won't let you go. One thing is very clear at the end: we want to read more about Holger Munch and Mia Krüger!

A very sophisticated and terrifying thriller, which keeps the reader guessing and gasping to the very last page. The story is powerful, the style is fluent, and the cast of characters is simply irresistible