The Hawkline Monster

Richard Brautigan
1974
Rating: 6.5

The onset of the pandemic and the lock-down have shattered my attention span, so I’m trying to read shorter books as a work-around. The Hawkline Monster is a quick and a fun read, I might call it whimsical. There are in its pages some food for thought though, and some very good writing. It bills itself as a “gothic western,” which is a fair assessment. It is a fairly bizarre and surreal take on the Western genre.

There is not much happening in terms of character development, but Brautigan has a good eye for weird details and a knack for layering complex ideas or themes into what is on the surface a sort of farcical tale of twin sisters who live in a haunted house.

Mild Spoilers Ahead

The book opens with the 2 main characters, Greer and Cameron, assassin-cowboy types from Oregon, laying low in a pineapple field in Hawaii, waiting to pop caps into the dome and/or ass of someone they’ve been paid to snuff out. But their intended target is teaching his son to ride a horse, and the assassins find themselves unable to kill a man while he is teaching his son how to ride. So, they don’t kill him.

Putting the cowboys in Hawaii created a pleasing dissonance, and as I came to the end of the story, I wondered about how that first scene fit into the story. It didn’t feel like Brautigan just randomly created that scene and then just left it there, but without re-reading the book I can’t really say what the scene meant.

There are other elements of the story that seemed to support or invite a second reading of the book. There are several pairings, duos, in the story that seem to be pointing to some larger idea.

In summary, it’s a quick and fun read, but not lacking in substance.

Might have to read Trout Fishing in America at some point, although it’s not high on my list.