Oakley Hall's legendary Warlock revisits and reworks the traditional
conventions of the Western to present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately
devastating picture of American unreality. First published in the 1950s,
at the height of the McCarthy era, Warlock is not only one of the most
original and entertaining of modern American novels but a lasting
contribution to American fiction.
"Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in ways, our national
Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the
Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the
confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the
Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock has
restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity.
Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who . . .
is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee of nervous
citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live
up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him, but also, we
feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the image to
exist. . . . Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with--the
rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines, the struggling for
political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the
personal crises of those in power--the collective awareness that is
Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called
society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh
and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as
a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock
one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of
us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself,
snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall's
to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly
behind us, has to fall." --Thomas Pynchon
