Not much more comes of this. The village is left to its doom, Adriko and Nair hitch a ride out with the Adventurists (“We’ve crawled from the wreck, we’ve walked away,” Nair muses), and, after freshening up, begin to consider where to try next. Abidjan? Maybe Liberia. (“Much is possible there.”) Uganda, Ghana, Senegal. . . . “There’s always Cameroon.”

One doesn’t feel warmly toward these buccaneers. They’re comedians, irredeemable. This is the world after 9/11 (many lifetimes past, now) with its new equations, fluid alliances and casuistries. To the question here, “Are you any kind of believer?,” the only answer can be no.

Denis Johnson is closest in sensibility to the great Robert Stone, though he lacks that writer’s command of plot and structure. Yet we don’t read Johnson for methodology but for troubled effect and bright astonishments. A writer should write in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and that nobody may say that he is innocent of what it is all about. Sartre says this, more or less, in “What Is Literature?” Johnson writes in just such a way. Life is ludicrous and full of cruel and selfish distractions. Honor is elusive and many find the copious ingestion of drugs necessary. Our ignorance is infinite and our sorrows fearful. We have made an unutterable waste of this world, and our passage through it is bitter and unheroic. Still, the horror can at times be illuminating, and it is necessary that the impossible be addressed. Here is the hapless murderer Bill Houston at the end of Johnson’s first novel, “Angels,” strapped down in the gas chamber, listening to the sound of his heart:

“Boom. . . . Boom! Was there ever anything as pretty as that one? Another coming . . . boom! Beautiful! They just don’t come any better than that. He was in the middle of taking the last breath of his life before he realized he was taking it. But it was all right. Boom! Unbelievable! And another coming? How many of these things do you mean to give away? He got right in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn’t going to come.”

Writing, like old age and Wyoming, is not for sissies.

Johnson was born in Munich, and his childhood was peripatetic. “Every move meant a chance to reinvent myself,” he’s said. His books take that same opportunity. This is his ninth novel. Others include the best-rendered post-nuke Florida Keys dystopia ever (“Fiskadoro”), the big and boldly retro Vietnam novel “Tree of Smoke” and the curiously hypnotic academic novel “The Name of the World.” There’s also the elegant and gloomy Americana novella “Train Dreams,” and lesser merely impressive and enjoyable entertainments, sly riffs on our orphanhood, our muddled dreams, our historical tininess, our moral wobbliness. He’s also written poetry, some plays, a single collection of short stories — the perversely divine “Jesus’ Son” — and a solid collection of political and travel essays, “Seek.” He probably plays the cello too.

“The Laughing Monsters” is a minor work — there’s no rocketing prose or conceptual jumping of lanes. Cheerfully nihilistic, it’s a buddy book dependent for much of its situation on several of Johnson’s early journalistic pieces about Liberia and Charles Taylor and the “atmosphere of happy horror” pervasive at the time. The whores and martinis and low-rent espionage seem no more than familiarly nostalgic, as does a time pre-Ebola. Africa is a hard land and it’s getting even harder.

In Johnson’s earlier novel “The Stars at Noon,” set in Nicaragua, a druggie prostitute is known as Mona Lisa because of her secretive beautiful smile that says: “It’s over — why are we still here?”