Warlock

By Oakley Hall
Introduction by Robert Stone

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

Reviews

Oakley Hall is a novelist who never seems to make a wrong move. His impulses for what’s dramatic, for what will touch and move us, for how to engage the issues of the heart with those of the mind, all are uncommonly acute. He is a writer to read and read again.
— Richard Ford

Oakley Hall is among our most absorbing novelists.
— Los Angeles Times

Oakley Hall has a gift for making the historical moment immediate and concrete, pulsing and white-hot.
— MacDonald Harris

Compelling . . . A powerful narrative that throbs unmistakably with the hum of a really big talent.
— Chicago Sunday Tribune

Warlock is a big novel in every sense of the word . . . Hall has earned his place above the literary salt with such as Van Tilburg Clark and Conrad Richter and A.B. Guthrie.
— San Francisco Chronicle

Not since Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s The Oxbow Incident has there been a novel of the West of as high a dramatic and literary quality as this one.
— Library Journal

Like Henry James and Mark Twain, Oakley Hall is a master craftsman of the story. [His] dialogue is perfectly pitched, and intrigue will keep you turning the pages.
— Amy Tan

Also see:

American Humor By Constance Rourke Introduction by Greil Marcus Constance Rourke's pioneering "study of the national character" examines such legendary figures as the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the minstrel singer to show how the popular comic imagination contributed to America's changing self-awareness.

Butcher's Crossing By John Williams Introduction by Michelle Latiolais The author of Stoner dismantles the myth of the making of the American west in this tale of a Harvard dropout who seeks adventure hunting one of the last great buffalo herds, but ends up losing his innocence.

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