The Hawkline Monster

I think The Hawkline Monster ties with In Watermelon Sugar for my favorite Brautigan novel so far. Brautigan’s gothic western masterpiece follows the exploits of Greer and Cameron, two Oregon hitmen hired to kill a monster that lives in ice caves beneath a Victorian house in the middle of nowhere. Their employers are the strange Miss Hawklines—twin sisters as eerily hard to pin down as the house itself. The sisters spend their time trying to perfect The Chemicals, their father’s unfinished experiment he was working on when he went missing, which presumably has something to do with the monster beneath the house. If Greer and Cameron can take care of their little problem, they might be able to get along nicely without any more distractions.

Surreal, dark, creative, and wonderfully sinister, The Hawkline Monster makes me want to time travel back to the beginning of the 20^th century, name myself Magic Child, and see the world through eyes acquainted with the strange.