by Denis Johnson.

FSG. 614 pages. $27.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

Stop everything this minute. Pick up this novel. It will blow you away.

What? Another novel about Vietnam? Yep, but that’s like saying Moby-Dick is a book about a whale. This stunning, scabrous, violent, hallucinatory, nightmarish, sumptuously written book, Johnson’s first in almost a decade, will delight, unnerve, disturb and derail you. It begins in 1964, culminates in the disastrous Tet offensive in 1968, and moves beyond to the wreckage that follows.

The characters: young Skip Sands, enamored by his heroic-demonic uncle, Colonel Francis, a CIA operative and former Japanese P.O.W.; Kathy Jones, the widow of a missionary in the Philippines and Canadian nurse desperate to save the wounded and abandoned; James and Bill Houston, two GI brothers, violent, drugged-out, spaced-out lost souls; Trung, the double agent operating between North and South Vietnam; Sgt. Jimmy Storm, a crazed visionary; and a host of others.

The reader reels from the heat and oppression of the jungle, the isolation of villages, the chaos of war as plots unfurl, splatter and shimmer. Now you see it; now you don’t. Does the CIA know what it’s doing? (Did it ever?) How much of the strange elliptical conversations can we trust, if anything? To whom or what can we cling to make connections, follow the cabals and the blood and the intelligence pipeline, the sudden lurches and travels, betrayals and assassinations? Who was that German? Was that priest really running guns?

Johnson’s visceral prose bristles with grisly, harrowing details of sex and sacrifice, riddled with information and insights that reveal entire cultures, the rituals of villages, the bureaucratic infighting of faceless interrogators, the feel and smell of rockets and guns, the fetid humidity of jungle and coast, the scrambled thoughts of characters lost in a strange realm of momentary stays against ultimate confusions. Dialogue crackles and burns a hole in your soul.

The tree of smoke: a biblical image that suggests apocalypse. The name of Colonel Sands’ master plan. An image that festers, smolders and shifts throughout this blood-soaked, soul-damaging epic.

Think Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, any novel you’ve ever read about war and Vietnam. And Johnson aces it. The suspenseful set-up for an assassination that goes wrong will keep you on the edge of your seat. Sands’ network and paranoia will come into shocking focus, then fade out, then surface suddenly again in a brothel, a hidden villa, atop a mountain, over gallons of alcohol, in sudden quips and asides seemingly made at random.

The novel burns with religious yearnings and spiritual quests amid its murdered and exiled priests, its remote outposts conjuring up cannibalistic ceremonies, its Vietnamese pilots lost amid American bungling, self-doubts, double-crosses and spurts of horror.

The final lines: “All will be saved. All will be saved.” A mantra of repetition that undercuts its own urgency. And haunts us today in Iraqi streets.