WARLOCK by OAKLEY HALL (1958)

I should have read Warlock a couple of months ago, along with the other Westerns that I read and reviewed. If I had done so, I would have included it in my list of favorites (January, 2016). It is a strange book, a kind of revisionist, stylized, existential look at the Old West. It features a set of stock characters--the gunslinger/lawman and his gambler best friend, the virtuous woman, the reformed whore, the conscientious deputy, the drunken judge, the rancher/cattle rustler, the gun-happy cowboys, and so on. In fact, the events are loosely patterned on the town of Tombstone, Arizona, during Wyatt Earp's term as Marshall. However, Hall's characters often don't behave in the ways we have been schooled to expect, and they certainly don't speak as one would expect. The dialogue, and there is a lot of it, is not in the Western vernacular, but instead is very formal and almost stilted, impossible for a reader to perceive as credible. In addition, several of the major characters obsessively examine their own motivations, actions, and purpose in life. My experience tells me that few people actually think, or want to think, about why they behave as they do.

Thus, this account of the Old West is not any closer to real life than the formulaic account of the heroic Shane or any of his ilk. It becomes instead almost a morality fable, with the gunslinger Blaisdell as the "hero" summoned to the town of Warlock to solve their problems so that they do not have to assume personal responsibility, and when he proves to be less than super-human, the townsfolk turn against him. One introspective townsman writes in his diary, "I asked of him only that he not fail. He has failed, yet how can a man be human and not fail?" Meanwhile, Blaisdell has himself become a victim of his own image. The deputy, Bud Gannon, begins to suspect that "nothing was ever clear, everything was incredibly difficult, complex, and suspect; there was no right way." The judge, long since fallen into existential despair, says, "...people don't matter a damn...And none of it matters a damn so long as the whiskey holds out." The gunslinger's gambler friend, Tom Morgan, proves to be the most self-aware of the characters, offering himself, without delusions, as a sacrifice for love.

This is an incredibly subtle and complex book in its subtext, and at the same time an incredibly suspenseful book in its surface story. That is quite an accomplishment. I would class this as my favorite anti--Western, even before those more celebrated novels by Cormac McCarthy.