Warlock is a microcosmic tale of man's obsession and struggle for power. The small, fictional South-Western town is the fulcrum on which the righteous and wicked vie to rule, the town's inhabitants perpetually caught in the crossfire.

Since Warlock is not deemed substantial enough to deserve its own county seat, and the nearest court being a day's ride away in Bright's City - the law of the land is somewhat hamstrung, amounting to a single jail in a ramshackle hut where the lengthening deputies' names scratched into the wall show the monotonous loss of life and cost of the power struggle.

In an attempt to take matters into their own hands, the inhabitants create a citizen's committee which decides to hire a cultish, golden gunned warden by the name of Clay Blaisedell, in order to gain their own standing in Warlock and kick back at the outlander band of troublemakers and their notorious leader, Abe McGowan.

The path of Oakley Hall's story is far from simple. Truth, morality and honour become convoluted and circumspect in the melting pot of power, righteousness a pinball ricocheting against the countless variables: wonts, desires and limitations of his dustbowl denizens.

“Is not the history of the world no more than a record of violence and death cut in stone? It is a terrible, lonely, loveless thing to know it, and see—as I realize now the doctor saw before me—that the only justification is in the attempt, not in the achievement, for there is no achievement; to know that each day may dawn fair or fairer than the last, and end as horribly wretched or more. Can those things that drive men to their ends be ever stilled, or will they only thrive and grow and yet more hideously clash one against the other so long as man himself is not stilled? Can I look out at these cold stars in this black sky and believe in my heart of hearts that it was this sky that hung over Bethlehem, and that a star such as these stars glittered there to raise men’s hearts to false hopes forever?”

Hall pens the complexity of life expertly and the reader, like his characters, become embroiled in and sullied by his prose. Warlock is a highly crafted and memorable tale that is well worth a read. ( )

In his introduction, [author:Oakley Hall|44545] said that "The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.' Although Warlock is a fictional story about a fictional town in a fictional state, it offers up more truth and insight into the events that happened in Tombstone, Arizona, than did any of the hundreds of so-called Factual accounts of those historical events.

What we know about the fictional town of Warlock is that it is a silver mining town situated near the border with Mexico. Outside of town live what are called cowboys by friends and rustlers by just about everyone else. The distinction appears to be that some don’t consider crossing the border to round up cattle belonging to Mexican rancheros as rustling, illegal, or even disreputable. Problems arise when these high-spirited cowboys go into town, get a snoot full, and start to act up (i.e.: shoot the barber for giving a bad cut, or the piano player for missing a note). As Warlock is unincorporated, there is no official court or law enforcement, so the town’s businessmen take it upon themselves to form a Citizens’ Committee which proceeds to hire a Marshal (aka skilled gunman) to restore order. Add to this a mine with its usual mix of nasty mine manager and unhappy miners and you pretty much get the picture.

What separates Warlock from other westerns with similar plots is that Hall uses it to carefully examine the subject of justice in general, and frontier justice in particular. There are few black hats in this story and no white hats at all. The so-called good guys all have their demons and the bad guys, for the most part, have their softer sides, if you probe long enough.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Thomas Pynchon, in his review, wrote that It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock, I think, one of our best American novels.

Society, then and now, is a fragile thing. Per Pynchon, "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." ( )

Fiction seemingly based on Tombstone story and the Lincoln County war. The characters are all philosophers, and there is an unreal quality. Has atmosphere of 1958 McCarthy allegory, but I can't really find it in there. Has some sentences like: "But we will have him, or you, and rather him; and you [italicized:] will have him for you will not have law and order." Pulitzer prize finalist. Praised as hyperreal, magical, but not, as far as I can find, deconstructionist. Brief review by Thomas Pynchon at
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_gift.html. What I like about Westerns isn't here. ( )

Not really finished. only read 100 pages, but I am currently reading 5 books at the same time and something had to give. I will pick up again - but later. ( )

Warlock is a rare book: a novel whose Western setting couldn't be further from the drawing rooms of England, but what George Eliot did for Middlemarch, Hall does for Warlock— a New Mexico (maybe) mining town that owes a lot to Tombstone, Arizona. To find a modern work that might compare to this, you have to look to another medium: David Milch's cable series Deadwood — to which this book served as an obvious inspiration. But the book, as is usually the case, is richer.

To be sure, the book requires a bit of work for those (like me) whose attention span has been shortened and dulled by online media. There are many scenes that, although fully described, have a meaning that may not become clear until many pages later. Sometimes you read them and wonder what you're missing, when in truth, you haven't missed anything. On the other hand, sometimes a character says something that you don't quite get, and you're left to remember what that character happened to see or hear in a previous chapter in order to make sense of it. Adding to this, the idiom that many of the character speak, though authentic-seeming, doesn't always match the conventional movie-Western idiom we're used to. It adds to the sense of realism, but sometimes it leaves you scratching your head. What does it mean to crawfish? What exactly is the difference between a jack and a mucker? In short, reading Warlock requires a brain; it may be a Western, but it's no mere airport read.

I regret that this book is set in a (violent) man's world. Amidst a couple of dozen well drawn males, there are only two significant female characters: one weak and controlling, one strong but ineffectual. Even in a rough, frontier mining town, that half of the human race deserves more representation. That said, the major characters are deep and believable, even while they occupy stock roles: Johnny Gannon, the inwardly sensitive but outwardly stoic deputy, always underestimated; Clay Blaisedell, the Gary Cooper gunslinger who finds himself bending under the weight of the role of town Superman; Tom Morgan, the despicable killer-gambler who is nonetheless Blaisedell's only true friend, and many more.

In short, this book is to your typical Western as a Jane Austen novel is to Bridget Jones' Diary. Warlock presents an unsentimental mix of complex characters and lets their internal and external struggles throw light on issues of individual and social morality that are relevant in all places and eras, and never more so than today. Rich, long, and increasingly absorbing as you do the necessary work of paying attention, it's the first novel I've read in several years that made me want to return to the first page and start again. ( )