In case you haven't read Pynchon on Warlock.

[Mark Kohut]

Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in ways, our national
Camelot; a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the
Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the
confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the
Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock (Viking)
has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded
humanity.  Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell
who, partly because of his blown-up image in the Wild West magazines
of the day, believes he is a hero. He is summoned to the embattled
town of Warlock by a committee of nervous citizens expressly to be a
hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live up to his image; that
there is a flaw not only in him but also, we feel, in the entire set
of assumptions that have allowed the -image to exist. It is
Blaisdell's private abyss, and not too different from the -town's
public one. Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with--the
rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in -the mines, the struggling
for political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the
personal crises of those in power--the collective awareness that is
Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called
society, with -its law and order, is as frail, as precari-ous, as
flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert a
easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that
makes Warlock, I think, one of our best American novels. For we are a
nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper
into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we
need voices like Oakley Hall's to remind us how far that piece of
paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall.

--Thomas Pynchon
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l