Excerpt from The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

ONE

Eleven years since my last visit and the Freetown airport still a shambles, one of those places where they wheel a staircase to the side of the plane and you step from European climate control immediately into the steam heat of West Africa. The shuttle to the terminal wasn't bad, but not air-conditioned.

Inside the building, the usual throng of fools. I studied the shining black faces, but I didn't see Michael's.

The PA spoke. Only the vowels came through. I called over the heads of the queue at the desk—"Did I hear a page for Mr. Nair?"

"No, sir. No," the man called back.

"Mr. Nair?"

"Nothing for such a name."

A man in a dark suit and necktie said, "Welcome, Mr. Naylor, to Sierra Leone," and helped me through the mess and chatted with me all through customs, which didn't take long, because I'm all carry-on. He helped me outside to a clean white car, a Honda Prelude. "And for me," he said, with a queasy-looking smile, "two hundred dollars." I gave him a couple of one-euro coins. "But, sir," he said, "it's not enough today, sir," and I told him to shut up.

The driver of the Honda wanted in the area of a million dollars. I said, "Spensy mohnee!" and his face fell when he saw I knew some Krio. We reached an arrangement in the dozens. He couldn't go any lower because his heart was broken, he told me, by the criminal cost of fuel.

At the ferry there was trouble—a woman with a fruit cart, policemen in sky-blue uniforms throwing her goods into the bay while she screamed as if they were drowning her children. It took three cops to drag her aside as our car thumped over the gangway. I got out and went to the rail to catch the wet breeze. On the shore the uniforms crossed their arms over their chests. One of them kicked over the woman's cart, now empty. Back and forth she marched, screaming. The scene grew smaller and smaller as the ferry pulled out into the bay, and I crossed the deck to watch Freetown coming at us, a mass of buildings, many of them crumbling, and all around them a multitude of shadows and muddy rags trudging God knows where, hunched forward over their empty bellies.

At the Freetown dock I recognized a man, a skinny old Euro named Horst, standing beside a hired car with his hand shading his eyes against the sunset, taking note of the new arrivals. As our vehicle passed him I slumped in my seat and turned my face away. After we'd passed, I kept an eye on him. He got back in his car without taking on any riders.

Horst … His first name was something like Cosmo but not Cosmo. Leo, Rollo. I couldn't remember.

I directed Emil, my driver, to the Papa Leone, as far as I knew the only place to go for steady electric power and a swimming pool. As we pulled under the hotel's awning another car came at us, swerved, recovered, sped past with a sign in its window—SPLENDID DRIVING SCHOOL. This resembled commerce, but I wasn't feeling the New Africa. I locked eyes with a young girl loitering right across the street, selling herself. Poor and dirty, and very pretty. And very young. I asked Emil how many kids he had. He said there were ten, but six of them died.

Emil tried to change my mind about the hotel, saying the place had become "very demoted." But inside the electric lights burned, and the spacious lobby smelled clean, or poisonous, depending on your opinion of certain chemicals, and everything looked fine. I'd heard the rebels had shot it out with the authorities in the hallways, but that had been a decade before, just after I'd run away, and I could see they'd patched it all up.

The clerk checked me in without a reservation, and then surprised me:

"Mr. Nair, a message."

Not from Michael—from the management, in purple ink, welcoming me to "the solution to all your problems," and crafted in a very fine hand. It was addressed "To Whom It May Concern." Clipped to it was a slip of paper, instructions for getting online. The desk clerk said the internet was down but not always. Maybe tonight.

Excerpted from The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson. Copyright © 2014 by Denis Johnson. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.