The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, by Richard Brautifan

Staff review by Chris Saliba

Strange, brilliant, funny, original – The Hawkline Monster is a trippy classic from a great American writer.

Richard Brautigan is best known for this novels Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar. Born in Tacoma, Washington in 1935, he eventually moved to San Francisco and became a part of the counter culture scene. Afflicted with alcoholism and mental health issues, he took his life at the age of forty-nine. During his short life he published many volumes of poetry and ten novels.

The year is 1902. Two killers for hire, Cameron and Greer, are procured by Magic Child, a fifteen year old Indian girl. She takes them to Oregon, to the house of Miss Hawkline. Upon meeting Miss Hawkline – a strangely tall, slender woman with long black hair – both men start to realise that Magic Child looks remarkably like Miss Hawkline. In fact, it turns out both women are twins. The young woman they knew as Magic Child, and who they thought was Indian, quickly becomes indistinguishable from her twin. The gunmen can no longer figure out who is Magic Child, or even if exists anymore.

The reason the men have been brought to this house, they learn, is to kill a dreaded monster living in the “ice caves” below the house. The monster has been accidently created by “the Chemicals”, a science experiment that the Hawkline sisters' father had been working on. They believe the monster has killed their father.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the monster, a mischievous and often comic character in his own right, has been messing with everyone's minds and creating havoc. The only answer is to kill the monster and then perhaps some sanity can be restored. But how to kill a monster created by a jar of unusual chemicals?

The plot sounds mad, ridiculous and completely unfathomable. Yes, it's all that. So many surreal and bizarre things happen, with the tone changing from the eerily mysterious to the outright comic, that the reader doesn't know what to think. And yet for all that the story holds its own internal logic and when the end comes, it all feels like an exhilarating if totally weird ride. It's hard to figure out what The Hawkline Monster is really about and perhaps it's best not to try! One thing can't be doubted: it's the work of a consummate original and is unforgettable.

The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, by Richard Brautigan. Published by Canongate. ISBN: 9781786890429  RRP: $19.99

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So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, by Richard Brautigan

Staff review by Chris Saliba

Richard Brautigan's last novel - a dreamy, hazy work of autobiographical fiction. 

Richard Brautigan is best known for this novels Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar. Born in Tacoma, Washington in 1935, he eventually moved to San Francisco and became a part of the counter culture scene. Afflicted with alcoholism and mental health issues, he took his life at the age of forty-nine. During his short life he published many volumes of poetry and ten novels.

So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away was Brautigan’s last published novel. A dreamy, hazy work of autobiographical fiction, it’s set in 1979. The narrator (who is never named) reminsces about several major personal events that happened in 1947, when he was twelve-years-old. The narrator’s troubles can all be traced to a single decision he made. Weighing up whether to spend his money on buying a burger from a local diner or on a box of bullets from a gun shop opposite, he settles on the latter. The narrator then invites his secret friend, named David, to an apple orchard where they can shoot at the apples. The secret friend is enormously popular at school and has a beautiful girlfriend. It’s almost tempting to think that he may be a figment of the narrator’s imagination, seeing no one knows about the friendship. While out shooting in the orchard, a terrible accident occurs, leaving the narrator to curse the day he decided not to buy a burger.

Having set up the plot’s teaser, the novel takes a while to get to the denouement, and inbetween we learn of various odd happenings in the narrator’s young life. Indeed, he several times admits that he is quite odd himself. Brautigan builds a nostalgic and idiosyncratic patchwork of his youth: a war veteran with only one lung who lives by a pond, the irrational fears of his mother, who continually fears seeping gas in their apartment, the eerie funeral parlour he lived next to as a child. The novel ends with a truly magic description of an unusual couple who bring their loungeroom furniture on a truck and set it up beside a pond. It’s all wonderfully surreal and hallucinatary. Brautigan is a master at evoking that time in our childhood when we are uncritical and imaginatively free, when the world around us imprints its every fleeting image onto us.

Witty, poetic, simply told and vividly imagined, So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away is a deeply affecting original.

So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away, by Richard Brautigan. Published by Canongate. ISBN: 9781786890467  RRP: $19.99

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