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Overview
Denis Johnson (1949–2017) was an American poet and author
. He first published “Emergency” in The New Yorker magazine in 1991. The next year, he included it in Jesus’ Son, a collection of interrelated short stories with a shared narrator. “Emergency” follows two drug-abusing young men who work menial jobs on the night shift at a hospital emergency room. The darkly humorous narrative presents an empathetic look at people getting by on the margins of American culture without romanticizing or denigrating them.Read a full story summary, a full story analysis, and explanations of important quotes from “The Masque of the Red Death.”
