Warlock again

[Sterling Clover]

Just only finished this now, and just reread Stone Junction before,  
in light of discussion on how they inform ATD, which they very much  
do. Trawled the p-list archives a bit and found some discussion, but  
ATD seems to bring it into a whole new light.

Extended Summary of Warlock follows, spoilers & all:




  A retelling of the Wyatt Earp/Tombstone story but refashioned. Clay  
Blaisdell as Earp called into protect Warlock from rampant cowboy  
gangs & with him (preceding him a little even) comes his buddy Morgan  
(Doc Holliday) who's a capital B bad backshooting sob that finds his  
one link to humanity in his  friendship for Clay, whom he will do  
anything to protect. This in turn bought about by a debt Morgan  
thinks he owes Clay, for setting him up to kill the fiancee of his ex- 
girl (whom he used to pimp for) Kate Dollar (aka Big Nose Kate). Clay  
is haunted by this killing, apparently unaware of Morgan's role, but  
treating as sacred the lesson he learned that "sometimes a man can be  
too fast." Then of course there's Gannon, the rider with the cowboys  
gone straight as a deputy and haunted by the massacre of Mexicans  
that his old gang carried out in the midst of a cattle rustling job  
gone wrong. Numerous twists unfold & indeed the famed shootout at the  
Acme (OK) Corral comes halfway thru. Story is told in part directly,  
in part through the diaries of a local shopkeeper, in part through  
legal transcripts (for the shootout) and in the concluding section  
through a letter. Meanwhile, a conflict brews between local miners  
who eventually strike, and the company, which will hire every gun it  
can to break them, be it from the law or from the cowboys.

Clay's function as Marshall becomes increasingly tainted by suspicion  
as the cowboys "posted" (i.e. banned by the citizen's council on pain  
of death, and eventually killed when they violate this) become  
increasingly ambiguous in their guilt. Especially through the voice  
of a drunken self-appointed judge, the question of the difference  
between rule of gun and rule of law is posed (but meanwhile the  
central courts these cats are shipped to when arrested are corrupt,  
ineffective, and the juries are subject to easy intimidation by the  
cowboys). McQuown, head of the cowboys, eventually, driven by  
paranoia and hubris as much as rationality, calls together Regulators  
(shades of Billy the Kid) and "posts" Clay himself. He is shot dead  
(backshot by Morgan, though this isn't revealed until much later) the  
night before they ride on the city, for which the cowboys blame  
Gannon, who in turn is forced to kill one, and in so doing begins to  
assume a genuine role as deputy and render the extra-legal forces of  
Blaisdell as increasingly unnecessary. Meanwhile Clay has taken up  
with Jessie, a "miner's angel" who runs a boardinghouse and hospital  
for the miners, becoming increasingly drawn into their struggle for a  
union.

The novel then turns to pivot on Clay, increasingly a cipher, weighed  
down by the myth he's generated and the expectations of him, even as  
his place in Warlock is increasingly unnecessary and uncertain.  
Jessie tries to drive him into new fits of heroism, Morgan tries to  
"rescue" him from being made into a statue, and meanwhile he mentors  
Gannon. Morgan, at the request of Jessie, wants to give Clay his  
"reputation" back so precipitates his "posting" from town to give  
Clay one last great deed and let Clay distance himself from his  
friend who is now widely rumored to have backshot McQuown and is  
known as one of the evilest men of the region, the black-hearted  
rattlesnake. Clay instead resigns.

The town finally gets its big-city lawmen sent in, except they turn  
out to be, on maneuvering from the mine company, soldiers sent to  
clean up the strikers, at which the whole town rebels, turning to  
Clay again, who attempts to bluff them down but refuses to shoot. He  
is beaten and pushed aside until the force suddenly led to Mexico in  
a hunt against "Apaches" by its senile General (in fact Mexicans who  
dressed as such to massacre cowboys, thus perpetrating revenge  
against the massacre Gannon had participated in years ago).

Morgan now tries again to give Clay back his reputation one more  
time, embarking on a shooting spree and forcing his old friend to  
kill him. Having done so, Clay is sent into a fit of grief and burns  
down a local Casino, forcing Gannon to threaten to arrest him in the  
morning. Gannon, now shacked up with Kate Dollar, doesn't  
particularly want to face Clay, nor does he think it is particularly  
good for anybody that he does, but feels weighted by the obligation  
of his post to do so nonetheless, because the laws either apply or  
they don't. Faced with Gannon in the morning, Clay, fully capable of  
outshooting him three times over, instead throws down his guns and  
rides off alone.

In an epistolary postscript we learn that Gannon was later shot by  
another cowboy, who in turn was finally found guilty at trial, and  
hanged in Warlock (the rule of law come at last), that many stories  
abound about Clay's later life, but none are confirmed, and that the  
mines surrounding Warlock eventually became deluged with water and  
closed down, leaving the town to shrivel away.

--end summary/spoilers--

Contra to lots of received p-list opinion, I thought this was a  
pretty incredible novel -- lots of complexity, some really stunningly  
written passages, big pulsing themes, etc. But the point of the  
summary was so I could point out two things that jumped out at me vis  
a vis ATD -- first, the similarities in the Clay/Morgan relationship  
and the Foley/Vibe relationship, this sort of strange bond formed out  
of one-sided debt. Along with that, the way in Warlock has no  
particular hero, but renders every character equally sympathetic/ 
unsympathetic, playing out a particularly American tragedy based on  
western notions of justice, honor and obligation. This sort of moral  
economy of karmic debt gives the entire novel its structure, and  
feels in someways transposed over to ATD, this idea that even the bad  
guys live by their own different and rigid sets of rules, and those  
rules themselves are what bring folks what they believed they had  
coming to them all along. (Cf., by the way, also the "ravens" in  
Stone Junction). Also there's a nice Hegelian turn that seems to have  
some resonance with ATD's coming of modernity -- the law men get is  
never the law they fought to get, and by the time they get it, it  
doesn't seem it was worth the doing at all.

I'm sure there's plenty more to be said here, but pounding out that  
summary almost wiped me out too much for any analysis.

--Sterl.