Customer Reviews

The Hawkline Monster

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
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If Salvatore Dali, Erik Satie, Ernest Hemingway, The Marx Brothers, Edgar Allan Poe and Sam Peckinpah ever collaborated on a work of brilliant eccentricity, then Richard Brautigan's bizarre, playful and throughouly entertaining novel The Hawkline Monster could have resulted from such a marriage made in surrealist heaven.

As the subtitle suggests, The Hawkline Monster is a gothic western loosely set at the turn of the twentieth century near The Dalles Oregon. It concerns two moronic hit men cut of silent film comedy cloth, a set of spinster twins harboring deep sexual desire, an aged "Lurch" like butler and an "Id" monster of imagined horror. And this is just scratching the surface of Brautigan's finest novel.

Brautigan is an aquired taste. One can easily apply the adjectives "elliptical", "ambigious" and "pretentious" when describing his work. Granted too, the short story and the poem were always his strongest format.

But Brautigan is never boring. His prose while fearless if a bit reckless never fails to paint unique images. Yes, while it is true that Brautigan frequently comes off as a prepubescent boy writing to stimulate his bubbling loins, he does balance it with a sincere ability to turn a phrase and capture a moment that could only exist in a fevered imagination. Brautigan was a unique voice now tragically silent.

It also passes a unique piece of criteria I have for any good book. It has to be read. This book is not filmable in any way. Thank God for that. Far too often, authors write with lucrative film rights dancing in their eyes. It is sad, yet strangely fortunate that Brautigan died before major prepackaged film deals completely nearly crippled the written word.

For those who enjoy taking literary risks without any guarantees, The Hawkline Monster comes highly reccomended. It is a fun, haunting and one of a kind way to spend a dark and stormy weekend.

In discussions, I have been told the Hawkline Monster is crude and wandering - senseless at times. Perhaps it is a look at a world, especially the world of popular TV fiction, that is just that. The story blends several popular soap-style themes with a delightful study of human tendencies portrayed with humor - the cumpulsive counting, for example. And the sexual fantasy and language that sometimes cause a stir are hardly pornography. The book laughs at pornography and, I think, the use of four-letter words sometimes relied upon to sell books. The Hawkline Monster is a gem in the right light. I can, however, see where some under different lighting and perhaps a narrow perspective find the book trashy. It is a must for those with curiousity, social perspective and a sense of humor.

I was not familiar with Richard Brautigan at the time I picked up both 'The Hawkline Monster' and 'Trout Fishing in America', but as he was shelved with Beat writers like Kesey, Wolfe, Burroughs and others, I thought his work would be worth a try. I had every intention of reading both books right away, but as often happens, they lingered, unread, on my bookshelves for years. Until recently, that is, when I finally cracked open "The Hawkline Monster".

Brautigan, from what I've been able to gather, has a reputation as a post-modernist author, and while I'm probably not familiar enough with all the nuances of the term, I really can't see why, based solely on 'Hawlkine'. If there is a subsection of Post-Modernism that depends on using four letter expletives as though they'd been bought in bulk for a discount, then I might agree that 'Hawkline' is Post-Modern. Or maybe a type that requires its characters to jump in the sack on the least pretext - then 'Hawkline' would also qualify. Maybe I'm prudish, but I don't think so - I strongly believe that all parts of language, human anatomy and human behavior are fair play in the novel that uses them to advance the depth of character or move the plot forward. I just never felt 'The Hawkline Monster' did any of that.

And the real shame of it is that, for the first third of the book, I was interested and pulled along by the setting and the characters and the allusions to the plot still to come. Brautigan presents the reader with two hired killers, and brief as their sketches are, convincingly paints them as professional, yet likable, men who I'm interested in following. The gunmen Greer and Cameron, after returning from a failed contract job in Hawaii, are approached by a stunningly beautiful girl, dressed as an Indian, who gives them 5 thousand dollars for an as yet undefined job. Curious, they follow the girl, Magic Child, as she leads them to first through Central County, then through the town of Billy, and lastly to Hawkline Manor in a remote area known as the Dead Hills.

The novel quickly establishes several different tacks the story could take: There is the feud between cattle and sheep ranchers ala the Lincoln County War, the imposing sheriff of the town of Billy, who looms as a possible threat, and even the dead man that Cameran sees who he is sure is a man he'd known back in Billings. Any and all of these mis-directions sound more interesting than what does happen, which just seems foolish to me. At Hawkline Manor, the gunmen find out that Magic Child has a twin sister, and that their father had moved to this remote location to further his experiments. They believed his experiment had gotten out of control, had turned on him and killed him, and was now 'haunting' them. The two gunmen are then contracted to kill the 'monster'. From that point, the novel descends into silliness and unbelievable leaps, as Brautigan tries to shift the point of view from the gunmen to the 'monster'.

Perhaps the Post-Modern tag comes from these shift in point of view, or else maybe the story is a representation of Monsters of the Id, but either way, as an experiment in fiction, it didn't work for me. I really felt as though this book was another example of the early 70's mindset that to curse and write about sex was daring and new. At that time, it probably was, and I don't necessarily think it was a gimmick used by Brautigan to sell books, but that doesn't necessarily make me like it, either. I'll still read 'Trout Fishing in America' someday, just to see if Brautigan's reputation was built on something more substantial than what I found in 'The Hawkline Monster'. As it also looks like a quick read, at least it won't take me very long to find out.

It was over 25 years ago I read 'the Hawkline Monster', and -like 'Jitterbug Perfume' by Tom Robbins- it has 'haunted' me all these years, years filled with reading hundreds and hundreds of other books from classics to sci fi to suspense to fantasys, each trying to out do the last with inventiveness and quirks. Yet despite the strength of many of them, even today the Hawkline Monster always nonchalantly steps through with a memory unique and all its own. I am looking for another copy now - the last mysteriously disappeared long ago. I can't wait!

The most gothic thing about this novel is its absolute refusal to stick to any sort of plausibility. Brautigan is matched only by Bradbury in his ability to create a completely new reality, explain the new rules (most of them absurd), tell a bunch of bald faced lies with a straight face, and convince the reader to go along with it. A pure celebration of the willingness to suspend disbelief. Occasionally I get the feeling he is not just entertaining me but trying to say something...who knows what?

If William Burroughs & Ken Kesey had a child, it would likely have ended up as Richard Braugtigan. Braugtigan is a writer who is both accessible and wildly unpredictable. His short novel THE HAWKLINE MONSTER is quite simply a masterpiece of existential terror. Two hired guns are brought to the wastelands of the Pacific Northwest to exterminate a "monster" living beneath the home of two very outre sisters. What they encounter is far more psychological than physical. Braugtigan quickly establishes a sense of dread but also manages to infuse the story with some very blunt humor. Brilliantly assembled via almost hypnotic prose, Braugtigan's book is extremeley involving, very entertaining and, though it will surely be dismissed by some as hippie mumbo jumbo, it's actually timeless.

For those to whom good prose and a daring, outlandish author are admired, this is thoroughly enjoyable, with delightful characters and a plot line you cannot guess at. It is fairly short but unique in its style. You won't be disappointed by this jewel.

My old friend P. Schreiber turned me onto Brautigan many years ago. I fell in love with Hawkline Monster the first time I read it and each and every time I pick it up. My dream has been to make a movie of the book - any fellow Hawkline movie lovers out there.

I HAVE READ THIS BOOK AT LEAST 4 TIMES AND EACH TIME IT STILL GETS ME GOING. IT GETS A LITTLE OFF KILTER AT TIMES, BUT YOU HAVE TO KEEP GOING, IT DOES ALL MAKE SENSE IN THE END. IF YOU THINK THIS IS STRANG E, TRY "TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA"

Richard Brautigan is without question one of the most inventive authors in the last thirty years. But his chief problem has always been consistency; some of his novels are passionate and creative, others feel like writing exercises. As you can probably tell, this is one of the latter. Here, Brautigan stumbles his two characters through a bizarre mad scientist plot which features a set of sisters who's identities are constantly changing, and who offer never-ending sexual fantasies. Right. Do yourself a favor. Blow off this one, and pick up "In Watermelon Sugar," or almost any other Brautigan title. Profoundly disappointing