Richard Brautigan, The Hawkline Monster, 1974

This his fifth novel is probably best described as ‘Richard Brautigan enters The Twilight Zone’, even though he set out to write a ‘gothic western’. Two hired gunmen are asked by two beautiful teenage sisters to dispose of a creature that lives beneath their Victorian mansion in Oregon. It’s as surreal and dreamlike as one expects from Brautigan, and the imaginative elements are mostly cheap Frankensteinian science fiction viewed through an opium haze. Brautigan was being playful and self-consciously ridiculous, the sex-and-death erotica subtext is there but never really explored beyond one quick scene, and if he had any real point to make it was probably that the imagination can produce negative results as well as good. Mostly good fun, but not one to lend to your kids.  PY

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