Warlock (1958 novel)
First edition cover
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| Author | Oakley Hall |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Legends West trilogy |
| Genre | Western |
| Publisher | Viking Press |
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Publication date
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1958 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 471 |
| 813'.54-dc22 | |
| LC Class | PS3558.A373W3 |
| Followed by | The Bad Lands |
Warlock is a western novel by American author Oakley Hall, first published in 1958. The story is set in the early 1880s, in a fictional southwestern mining town called Warlock and its vicinity. The novel's characters and many elements of its plot are loosely based on actual people and events from Tombstone, Arizona during the same time period, including Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
Hall's most famous novel, Warlock was a finalist for the 1958 Pulitzer Prize, and has since been hailed as a classic of American West literature. Writers Thomas Pynchon and Richard Fariña were especially fond of the novel, even dedicating what Pynchon called a "micro-cult" to it while students at Cornell University. Pynchon praised it for restoring "to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity", and for showing "that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels."
Hall's subsequent novels The Bad Lands (1978) and Apaches (1986) are sequels to Warlock, though they do not portray the same principal characters or setting. The three novels together form the Legends West trilogy.
In 1959, Warlock was adapted into a film of the same name starring Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and Anthony Quinn.
When violence threatens the frontier boomtown of Warlock, a Citizens' Committee determines to take action against criminal cowboys and cattle rustlers. A gunslinger named Clay Blaisedell, who has achieved considerable renown in Texas, is hired as town marshal to keep the peace. He is followed to Warlock by his close friend Tom Morgan, a gambler and saloon owner with a sour reputation, and Kate Dollar, a former prostitute bent on vengeance. Though Blaisedell at first manages to assert his authority with his stolid demeanor and expert gunmanship, Abe McQuown and his troublesome gang of cowboys seek to antagonize him.
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