The Hawkline Monster

© 1974 by Richard Brautigan

Wow. I am floored.

Reading The Hawkline Monster is the closest thing to dropping acid without dropping acid. That is, from what I’ve been told about dropping acid. It was also the most entertaining and shocking read I’ve read in a long, long, long time.

Written in one- or two-page “chapters,” it is a blisteringly fast read. I started late one night and put away 35 pages in a half-hour. Next day I finished it, 145 more pages, in two hours. I often write in reviews that I “couldn’t put this book down,” but in this case, it’s the brutal truth: I couldn’t put this book down.

How can I possibly summarize the story? Let’s see ... Magic Child, an Indian girl of indeterminate age, meets up with two assassins-for-hire in a 1902 San Francisco house of ill-repute with a proposition: a Miss Hawkline wants them to kill a monster for $5,000. The men willingly agree and ride out to Oregon to the Hawkline mansion, built over “ice caves” by a mad scientist who happens to be Miss Hawkline’s father. Only the doctor is now missing and presumed to be monster fodder.

Very quickly things get weird. Excuse me, weird-er. Magic Child morphs along the journey and winds up as Miss Hawkline’s indistinguishable twin sister, and is now also refered to as “Miss Hawkline.” And the two assassins, Cameron and Greer, a cross between the two Bond killers from Diamonds Are Forever and John Travolta / Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction mixed into and out of Unforgiven, discover that the “monster” somehow is something that plays with all their minds, and the line between reality and dream becomes increasingly thinner and thinner. For instance, the simple suggestion, “Let’s just grab the shotgun and go downstairs and kill this thing,” never quite gets put into action.

All the characters, main and peripheral, are so weirdly interesting and magnetic I wished those one- and two-page scenes were drawn out to five- or ten-. No, that’s not exactly true; then the novel would lose its disjointed, unreal feel. Maybe I really wish there were more scenes with all these characters. There’s a giant of a butler who shrinks to a midget, a man who becomes an umbrella stand, a whole bunch of standard Western townsfolk right out of a slightly-skewed parallel universe. Characters are enfleshed very obliquely, a line here or there yielding a total backstory, very effectively and quite masterfully.

Why was it a “shocking” read? Well, and this is kind of embarrassing, but the novel’s quite a bit more sexually explicit than the normal fare Hopper reads. Not explicit in a titillating way; more just for shock value, a splash of cold water on any unsuspecting readers (ahem) looking unsuspectingly to read a “Gothic Western.” Or maybe that’s hot water, dunno.

If I have any complaint with the book, it’s with the monster itself. It’s closer to Forbidden Planet than, say, Beowulf. There ain’t no dragon. But it’s not something just in our minds, despite the monster playing with our minds by playing with the characters’ minds. It is an entity – I guess – for it has thoughts and motivations and a physical presence. At least, I think so, but on further reflection, I could be so far wrong it’s laughable.

Richard Brautigan is somewhat of a cult figure, dying way too young and leaving behind a hodgepodge of poetry, short stories, and novels. First learned of him from an homage short story by Philip Jose Farmer, a story that I liked. Based on this work, I’ll have to research further to see if there is anything else of his I must read. As an aside, The Hawkline Monster has been off-and-on in Hollywood development hell, with various actors over the years attached to it. One such name is so perfectly perfect that he did get it made and starred in it, in a parallel universe: Jack Nicholson. And in that universe, the movie bombed at the box office but became a sleeper cult classic twenty-five years later.

Grade: A+