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Warlock
  • Published: 12 January 2027
  • ISBN: 9780241823071
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 656
  • RRP: $28.99
Categories:

Warlock

Formats & editions
Paperback
12 Jan 2027
EBook
24 Sept 2026
EBook
5 Aug 2014
Paperback
15 Mar 2005
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A renowned gunslinger tries to impose law and order in an anarchic frontier boomtown, in this classic Western

The taste and smell of Warlock was not merely that of its dust, but the taste of apprehension, the smell of fear and anger like a dangerous animal snarling and stinking in its cage . . .

In the dust-soaked, lawless town of Warlock, chaos reigns. After a band of local cowboys led by the cut-throat Abe McQuown chases the deputy sheriff out of town, the local citizens decide to take action. Enter famed Texan gunslinger Clay Blaisedell, hired to restore the peace and see off the outlaws, from San Pablo in the valley to the distant peaks of the Dinosaur Mountains. But in the heat-haze of the town, allegiances shift and justice blurs with vengeance. As a strike in the local silver mines reaches fever pitch, each man and woman must face the horrors of the past, and confront an uncertain future.

Inspired by true events surrounding the infamous gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, Warlock blazed a trail for the modern Western. A finalist for the 1958 Pulitzer Prize, it offers a scathing deconstruction of the myth of America and the duel between order and anarchy.
  • Published: 12 January 2027
  • ISBN: 9780241823071
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 656
  • RRP: $28.99
Categories:

About the author

Oakley Hall

Oakley Hall was born in 1920 in San Diego and grew up there and in Honolulu. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, Hall joined the Marine Corps and was stationed in the Pacific during the Second World War. Following the war, he continued his studies in France, Switzerland and England, returning to the US to receive an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Hall published his first book, Murder City, in 1949, and went on to write more than twenty works of fiction and non-fiction. Best known for his novels set in the Old West, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 with his revelatory novel Warlock. Hall was director of the writing programme at the University of California, Irvine, for twenty years and among his many honours are lifetime achievement awards from the PEN Center USA and the Cowboy Hall of Fame. He passed away in 2008.
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Praise for Warlock

[A] brilliant novel of the violent West

San Francisco Chronicle

One of our best American novels

Thomas Pynchon

Like Henry James and Mark Twain, Oakley Hall is a master craftsman of the story. [His] dialogue is perfectly pitched, and intrigue will keep you turning the pages

Amy Tan

A vast mural of a novel

Los Angeles Times

Warlock is a story of the birth pangs of law and order, and the final arbitration of the six-shooter . . . hard to give a higher tribute to a book on the early West

New York Herald Tribune

[Warlock] blazed a trail for much of the best modern fiction of the American west

Guardian