The Hawkline Monster: a Gothic Western / Richard Brautigan
In the early years of the 20th Century, a huge Victorian mansion stands isolated from the world in the Dead Hills of Eastern Oregon.
It is home to Professor Hawkline, his beautiful daughters, and the secret laboratory that lies hidden in the basement deep beneath the house. But something has gone horribly wrong with the professor’s experiments. He has disappeared and the monster he has unwittingly created is loose somewhere in Hawkline Manor.
So the Hawkline sisters send for professional killers to destroy the monster and rescue their father from oblivion. But even as the hired gunslingers plot its destruction, the Hawkline Monster howls and roars while its diabolic blend of mischief and evil takes hold.
Richard Brautigan was born in the Pacific Northwest of the USA in 1935. He wrote ten novels including Trout Fishing in America which sold over 2 million copies throughout the world, nine volumes of poetry, and a collection of short stories. Brautigan came of age in and lived for many years around San Francisco and Big Sur and is often referred to as ‘the last of the Beats’. His comic genius and counter-cultural vision of American life made him a literary idol of the 1960s and 70s. He committed suicide in Bolinas, California in 1984, at the age of forty-nine.
“The twists and turns of the plot, the precise coolness of the language, the rich humour and wicked wit make this book a classic.”
“Reads like a spaghetti Western crossed with Frankenstein, veiwed through an opium haze.’”
