Oakley Hall, Warlock, (1958)

Warlock is the story of the OK Corral and associated events, but artfully (masterfully?) reworked into a familiar but not too familiar story about a town named 'Warlock'. Hence the title. It's a long book (475 pages or so) but good enough that I finished it in 2 days. This is a western, but not a black hats/white hats kind of western - it's a story of cowboys against townsmen, miners against cowboys, mine owners against miners, the marshal versus the cowboys, the deputy sherriff against the cowboys and the marshals, and everybody against the Mexicans except the General, who is against the Apaches (long since dead).

If you choose to read you will quickly come to realize that this book is the movie Tombstone, only better in every way. Doc, Kate, Wyatt, Johnny Ringo, that singer woman what carries on with Billy Zane, the gang's all here - tweaked and made to dance for your enjoyment in a tale of the frontier, of law and order, of the distance between the two and how to traverse it. It's also incidentally about gunfightin', whorin', drinkin', knifin', rustlin', gamblin', we-was-here-first-in', rootin', tootin' AND shootin' and just about any -ing word that can be artfully shortened with an apostrophe.

Read this book!