Ep 133 The Hawkline Monster

Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke "Central County
was a big, rangy county with mountains to the north and mountains
to the south and a vast loneliness in between. The mountains were
filled with trees and creeks. The loneliness was called the Dead
Hills. They were thirty miles wide. There were thousands of hills
out there: yellow and barren in the summer with lots of juniper
brush in the draws and a few pine trees here and there, acting as
if they had wandered away like stray sheep from the mountains and
out into the Dead Hills and had gotten lost and had never been able
to find their way back...poor trees..." The podcast heads west for
this October's horror fiction episode, where they find a couple
cowboy killers recruited from a brothel to vanquish a mischievous
monster in an isolated mansion out in Eastern Oregon. Richard
Brautigan's rugged, experimental, very funny The Hawkline Monster:
A Gothic Western begins as a travelogue of turn-of-the-century
frontier life and makes a drastic shift to the surreal when the two
gunmen (who don't put any lace on their killings) reach their
sinister assignment. Artist and American Western history expert
David Lambert is on hand to offer his take on whether
countercultural cult poet/novelist Brautigan passes muster as a
western writer, or if Hawkline Monster is a xerox copy of an
audacious literary achievement. Lambert talks with hosts
Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs about the unmistakable
Brautigan-ness of the novel, how the book fares when it moves into
much stranger territory in its second half, and the fascinating
decades-spanning background of multiple failed movie adaptations.
The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com David Lambert on X:
twitter.com/DavidLambertArt The Pink Smoke on X:
twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on X:
twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea
for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"