Warlock

Like Lonesome Dove and Deadwood, Warlock takes the western genre and refuses all the cliches, creating the possibility of actually understanding history in the terms of men, women, their frailties, and the power of the land. It goes beneath the obvious surfaces, reweaves actual history, and adds a level of writing expertise that makes it an American classic along the lines of what Hawthorne does to the Gothic in The Scarlet... Read Full Review

Page 408 of Warlock contains the following: "Men are like corn growing. The sun burns them up and the rain washes them out and the winter freezes them, and the cavalry tramps them down, but somehow they keep growing. And none of it matters a damn so long as the whisky holds out." I don't usually read books that talk about whisky and cavalry, but this one was really good. Although a lot of the writing is like the quote... Read Full Review

NYRB remains one of the few companies I will buy books from directly instead of used online- and that's because they put out titles like this. Anyone looking for the core text of shows like Deadwood, Rome, even the Sopranos, need look no further than Oakley Hall's imaginative way with the character driven plot and then, lo and behold, you realize everyone's cribbing from Hall! Ok, of course not point by point, but this book... Read Full Review

I was googling for info on the interesting and enigmatic Thomas Pynchon recently, when I came to find out that this book I had never heard of: "Warlock" by Oakley Hall was one of his all-time favorites. As luck would have it, I found an e-bay auction about to expire with a first edition hardcover copy of the title and snapped it up as quickly as I could. The surprises which come from a sense of adventure in book choices are... Read Full Review

Warlock was an enormous genre-stretch for me, someone who doesn't usually go in for Westerns at all, generally sticking to horror and science fiction on the popular end of the literature scale; and with ummm... modernist and po-mo novels and poetry on the non-popular end. In fact, it was my favorite author, Thomas Pynchon, mentioning "Warlock" as an influence and college favorite in his preface to Richard Farina's "Been Down... Read Full Review