| Warlock | |
|---|---|
Cover of first edition |
|
| Author(s) | Oakley Hall |
| Country | United States |
| Publisher | New York Review Books Classics |
| Pages | 471 (U.S. paperback) |
| ISBN | 978-1-59017-161-5 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813'.54-dc22 |
| LC Classification | PS3558.A373W3 2005 |
| Preceded by | Mardios Beach |
| Followed by | The Pleasure Garden |
Warlock is an American western novel by author Oakley Hall first published in 1958.
The novel is loosely based on characters and events that took place in the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona.[1]
Hall's most famous novel, Warlock was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1958.[2][3] Writer Thomas Pynchon praised it for restoring "to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity" and showing "that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels."[4]
In 1959, it was made into a film, also called Warlock, starring Henry Fonda.
Oakley Hall's Warlock is about the fictional frontier boomtown of Warlock and its residents' attempts to keep the peace. In the novel, after escalating violence in the town, a group of citizens form a committee to determine a course of action against criminal cowboys and cattle rustlers. They decide to hire a gunslinger from Texas named Clay Blaisedell, and although things go smoothly at first, the morality of life in the legal no-man's-land becomes even more ambiguous.