The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western was published by Simon & Schuster in 1974 and represents Brautigan’s most successful experiment with genre fiction — the first of his “genre novels” in which he applied his distinctive sensibility to established popular forms. The subtitle tells you exactly what you’re getting: a Gothic (haunted house, monster, mad science) crossed with a Western (gunslingers, frontier, 1902 Oregon). The result is pure Brautigan: funny, strange, weirdly beautiful, and impossible to classify.
The Novel
Cameron and Greer are professional killers — quiet, competent men who dispatch targets with workmanlike efficiency. A mysterious woman named Magic Child hires them to travel to eastern Oregon and kill the Hawkline Monster, which lives in the ice caves beneath her dead father’s mansion.
The house itself is wrong: rooms rearrange themselves, objects transform, shadows behave independently. Professor Hawkline’s experiments with “The Chemicals” — a glowing substance in the caves below — have created something that distorts reality. The monster is not a creature in the conventional sense but a principle of transformation — it changes things into other things, including (eventually) the characters themselves.
The plot resolves with deadpan logic: the gunslingers apply their professional skills to the supernatural problem, and the supernatural responds to the application of physical force. The ending is both absurd and perfectly consistent with the novel’s internal rules.
Genre Play
Brautigan’s “genre novels” (he wrote a detective novel, a Japanese novel, a monster novel, and others) are not parodies. He takes the genres seriously as formal structures — but inhabits them with his own consciousness, which is gentler, odder, and more melancholy than any genre typically permits.
The Hawkline Monster respects the Western’s codes: its gunslingers are genuinely dangerous, the landscape is genuinely desolate, the historical setting is genuinely evoked. And it respects the Gothic’s codes: the house is genuinely uncanny, the monster genuinely threatening. What Brautigan adds is his characteristic tonal register — a sweetness and bewilderment in the face of violence and strangeness that belongs to no genre.
Commercial Success
The Hawkline Monster was Brautigan’s best-selling novel after Trout Fishing in America — the genre frame made it accessible to readers who found his more experimental work opaque. Simon & Schuster’s marketing emphasized the “Gothic Western” tag, which gave bookstores somewhere to shelve it and readers a frame for approaching it.
Collecting The Hawkline Monster
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1974): Black boards with gold lettering. Dust jacket with Victorian-Gothic illustration.
Identification points:
- Simon & Schuster imprint
- “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10” number line (first printing includes “1”)
- 214 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $100–$300. The larger first printing (a major publisher, Brautigan’s commercial peak) makes this more available than the Grove Press novels.
Signed copies: $300–$800.
The novel’s genre appeal gives it crossover collecting interest — horror collectors, Western enthusiasts, and literary fiction collectors all seek it, which sustains demand beyond Brautigan’s core audience.