Novel: The Hawkline Monster

Overview
Richard Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western folds two very different American myths into a single, strange tale. It pairs the spare, laconic world of frontier gunmen with the ornate dread of a Victorian mansion haunted by an undefined menace. What begins as a straightforward job, two professional shooters hired to exterminate a "monster", unfolds into an absurd, melancholy fable that constantly slips between literal action and surreal suggestion.
The novel keeps its distances and softens its edges. Brautigan's voice is at once economical and vividly odd, using plain statements that open onto surreal images. The result is both a parody of genre conventions and a melancholy meditation on loneliness, desire, and the human tendency to make monsters of what cannot be understood.

Main Characters
Greer and Cameron are practical, taciturn gunslingers whose partnership is defined by competence and a cautious camaraderie. They accept assignments, keep their own counsel, and react to the bizarre with pragmatic disbelief; their dry sensibilities ground the novel's more eccentric moments. They are not archetypal heroes but weary professionals who carry their pasts with a quiet, worn dignity.
Miss Hawkline, the young woman who hires them, is an enigmatic figure: genteel, distant, and burdened by the legacy of her family's mansion. Her request sets the plot in motion and her motives remain shadowed by grief, propriety, and an almost metaphysical preoccupation with the house's interior life. The mansion itself functions as a character, full of creaks, servants, secrets, and a presence that resists easy explanation.

Plot Summary
The story opens when Greer and Cameron arrive at Hawkline House to investigate and remove whatever is terrorizing the household. The house's Victorian trappings clash with the men's frontier pragmatism; servants and residents are as much a mystery as the sounds and shadows in the walls. The investigation involves the men patrolling rooms, speaking with the household, and attempting to trace the monster's appearances, but every tidy clue dissolves into oddity.
As they probe the mansion's secrets, conventional cause-and-effect yields to suggestion, coincidence, and the eerie logic of dreams. Relationships form in unexpected ways: attraction, sympathy, and unease complicate the job. Confrontations with physical danger alternate with moments that feel like staged tableaux or fable. The finale resists a neat resolution, leaving readers with a mix of comic deflation and uncanny awe rather than a conventional triumph over evil.

Themes and Style
Brautigan blends satire and sincerity to examine isolation, the failure of communication, and the fragility of masculine myth. The pairing of Western men with a haunted house exposes how myths fail to explain interior suffering; toughness and expertise are powerless against psychic emptiness and the strange workings of history. The "monster" is at once feared, sought, and indistinct, functioning as a symbol for loss, inheritance, and the uncanny persistence of the past.
Stylistically, Brautigan's prose is deceptively simple: wry, elliptical sentences carry sudden poetic images and whimsical absurdities. The novel parodies genre expectations while lovingly inhabiting them, producing a tone that moves from droll to elegiac. Humor and melancholy coexist, giving the book a dreamlike rhythm that lingers after specific plot points fade.

Tone and Legacy
The Hawkline Monster occupies a unique niche in American fiction, admired for its genre-bending audacity and its quietly unsettling mood. It reads like a tall tale recited in a barroom by someone who has seen too much and learned to laugh anyway. Its unanswered questions and tonal bravado have kept it a distinctively Brautigan work: playful, haunting, and defiantly offbeat, offering more feeling than tidy explanation.