Warlock

Amazing. Fun and tragic and agonizing and hilarious. I have never enjoyed so thoroughly a book in which so many people are killed. The characters are simultaneously archetypes and originals; they're just the kind of people you'd expect to populate a town like Warlock, but then you begin to see through them and it's a bit sickening to know them too well. At the same time, they have convictions and reactions that I believe in but don't always understand, but my lack of understanding makes me appreciate it all the more.

For me, the American western is cozy and familiar but yet distant, in the same way the British worlds of Dorothy Sayers, Anthony Powell, and Barbara Pym are – times and places that I feel connected to but don't really know. The story's ending was inevitable but for most of the book I couldn't see how it could make it there, and it was heartbreaking when it did.

I dog-eared a lot of pages, much more than any other book I've read recently, and I need to go back to them all to decide what passages to quote here.

“The pursuit of truth, not facts, is the business of fiction.” – Oakley Hall, from the Prefatory Note