{"product_id":"9781590178232","title":"Warlock","description":"Oakley Hall's legendary \u003ci\u003eWarlock\u003c\/i\u003e revisits and reworks the traditional conventions of the Western to  present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately devastating picture of  American unreality. First published in the 1950s, at the height of the  McCarthy era, Warlock is not only one of the most original and  entertaining of modern American novels but a lasting contribution to  American fiction.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in  ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues  are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang;  where the confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity  of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock has  restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity.  Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who . . .  is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee of nervous  citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live  up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him, but also, we  feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the image to  exist. . . . Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with—the  rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines, the struggling for  political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the  personal crises of those in power—the collective awareness that is  Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called  society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh  and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as  a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes \u003ci\u003eWarlock\u003c\/i\u003e one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of  us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself,  snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall's  to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly  behind us, has to fall.\" —Thomas Pynchon","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47178660544752,"sku":"9781590178232","price":10.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781590178232_p0.jpg?v=1763809462","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781590178232","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}