'The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western' by Richard Brautigan
For the Never News Short Book Club, Colin reads novels under 250 pages each week; readers are encouraged to read along at their own pace and check back when they’re ready. Paid subscribers get to vote on the books read each month. This month’s book is: Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western.
The biggest selling point for Richard Brautigan is his poetic sense of humor; it is not, say, plot.
This isn’t to say that The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western doesn’t have a plot. Two professional killers in the early 1900s are contracted by two women to kill a monster in their house. It sounds, from the elevator pitch, 100% thrilling.
The thing with Brautigan, however, is that he is — at his best — meandering, redundant, and joyfully without direction. These aren’t faults, they are charms. One doesn’t come to a Brautigan novel and expect high action, incredible frights, or really anything more substantially active than a sort of smirking self-awareness.
What Hawkline has that his other novels do not is that supposed genre trapping; this is, at least on the surface, a Western (if not a Gothic one); to my knowledge, none of his other novels live outside of the 1960s and 1970s free-love and LSD world from which he wrote.
It’s that world — and not the cowpokes and horses one — that Brautigan draws his sensibilities. It was a pre-ironic culture, one that was nominally, shamelessly earnest in its political and emotional truths. Brautigan is firmly entrenched in the countercultural elements of the 60s, and while I don’t believe there’s a writer in the world that doesn’t have a deep kernel of cynism in them, Brautigan’s is never so pronounced to allow his writing never stray too far into the dark.
Hawkline, then, is a warm-hearted comedy (so long as you ignore the alarming ages given to the women). Hardly a pages goes by where the reader won’t smile to themselves at some humorously repeated detail or poetic gaff.
Of our two killers, Greer and Cameron, he writes “They both looked the same except they had different features and different builds. It was the way they handled themselves that was memorable.” They don’t look anything alike and yet they somehow seem the same.
The women look alike, too: “They looked so much alike that they could have been twins. Everybody in town noticed it but there was nothing they could do about it, so they just let it be.”
Throughout the novel are these little humorous truisms — things that don’t really matter but feel profound in their humor. “At one time Greer thought he saw something different but he was mistaken. What he saw was exactly the same as what he had been seeing.” That feels entirely superfluous, yet that is exactly what the novel wants: to make you see what is there but feel what is not.
This was my second reading of The Hawkline Monster, and though I was a little less charmed by it now than I was ten or so years ago, it still caught me off guard; I laughed more than I anticipated. ★★★☆☆
January’s Never News Short Book Club:
01.10.25 - The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş
01.17.25 - Passing by Nella Larsen
01.24.25 - The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western by Richard Brautigan
01.31.25 - The Aspern Papers by Henry James
The friend group Comic Book Club read the first volume of Usagi Yojimbo this last month. Anybody who was a young boy (and plenty of young girls) in 1989 knows about Usagi Yojimbo; the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figure ended up in all our toyboxes (or our friends’ toyboxes), even if we didn’t see the handful of episodes of the TMNT animated series he featured in.
We met to discuss the book on Sunday, and (as one of the Jeremys put it) the book is very solid in a way that means that there isn’t a lot to say about it. Which is to say: great funny animal cartooning, great samurai action, but not much more than that.
That’s the problem of looking at the earliest stories in series’ with great longevity: the book isn’t at its peak of storytelling. I’m sure there are major, weighty epics of Usagi somewhere in his 40-year publication history (hell, a miniseries just wrapped last year and a new one starts in two months!); one of those stories might better have told us what’s what with the Bunny Samurai.
That sort of further reading is, as always, added to a never-ending to-be-read list somewhere in the back of my head. I like that rabbit; I have a lot on my plate otherwise. ★★★☆☆
I dove back into my freelance work, reviewing pop-culture non-fiction, which means a lot of my reading time was spent slogging through a book about a band that I absolutely give no shits about (one that I actively dislike, even). That’s the life of a critic, I guess — you look at the quality of the work, not the quality of the subject.
I’ve also been reading Playworld by Adam Ross, released this month, which is an above-average sized novel — a far departure from the short books we’re reading for this book club. It’s mostly good so far.
Also circulating is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book from last year, The Message, which I am reading both because I really love Coates’ work and because I’m reading some of his Black Panther comics for review and I thought “why not give myself more work for my work?”
My work over on AIPT this week:
-Doctor Doom: Books of Doom remains as solid as it felt twenty years ago.
I was surprised to find that Armor Wars, a story that seemed to mean a great deal to a great many people, didn’t live up to my expectations.
Thanks for the walk down memory lane with the Hawkline Monster!