QUICK SHOTS: The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan

I'm going to be honest with you folks. I read The Hawkline Monster months ago and didn't think I'd review it. I sorta didn't think I didn't think I could really review it. It was something I read very fast. It's very different than the usual thing I review here (though in some way very much the same) but mostly I think it just took me a few months to truly digest it. I don't think I still got it fully digested but that's a problem for future me.

I was writing a movie (that I'm now making) at the time. It's a horror film with a character that can massage and shift your reality and surprise, surprise, the universe gave me the right book at the right time. A book that sorta massgaes reality. Things work out like that sometimes. I have had a copy of The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan on a shelf since my teens (seems like a long time) and I've always meant to read it. I have to be in the right mood for westerns. I have to be in the right mood for horror novels. A horror/western? Talk about the right mood.

But The Hawkline Monster called to me. Much as it calls to the characters within the novel and I pulled it off the shelf and read it nearly in one sitting. That's no great accomplishment. It's a slim, fast read of a book and the words seem to just float on into your brain. It's what I would call a bawdy novel of the 70s with supernatural and metaphysical touches. It's also a parody of tough-guy westerns and gothic horror stories, buts it's also very unsettling. See it's got its cake and it's eating it too. 

Richard Brautigan was a counter-culture writer of the time, with some scores to his name. Somewhere along the way he wrote The Hawkline Monster. I've never read any of his work before, but I've been aware of him for a long time, and I recently picked up his mystery novel Willard and His Bowling Trophies, and it got me thinking about Hawkline. Cameron and Greer are two guns for hire; they carry rifles and revolvers in a big trunk and get hired (in a whorehouse) to come to a house and kill the monster that lives under the joint in some "ice caves," by Magic Child, the native American woman/girl (she changes like everything in the book) who takes them to the spooky house.

Once they get to the place they find Miss Hawkline the owner, a spooky butler and well something about the house clouds folks minds. It's something in the air that prevents them from going on and getting to the monster killing. Mostly it's sex that distracts them. Good distraction. Everything past this is a series of funky scene strung together before Cameron and Greer shake off enough to grab their guns and go down into the caves.

In a lot of ways this is a hippy-dippy take on a B-movie. Several B-movies, a poverty row western mixed with a monster/mad scientist movie then the whole thing was dipped in acid and left to soak, oh, and add a "dirty movie" in the soup for good measure. It's a crass and crude book that at times feels like a dirty Belmont-Tower paperback then will swing into something gonzo. It's a book that that's not for everyone, and honestly, I think the whole thing was a bit of a joke Brautigan was playing on the readers, but it's a good joke if you're in a joking mode. I was and I loved it.

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!