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"Central County was a big, rangy county with mountains to the north and mountains to the south and a vast loneliness in between. The mountains were filled with trees and creeks. The loneliness was called the Dead Hills. They were thirty miles wide. There were thousands of hills out there: yellow and barren in the summer with lots of juniper brush in the draws and a few pine trees here and there, acting as if they had wandered away like stray sheep from the mountains and out into the Dead Hills and had gotten lost and had never been able to find their way back...poor trees..."

The podcast heads west for this October's horror fiction episode, where they find a couple cowboy killers recruited from a brothel to vanquish a mischievous monster in an isolated mansion out in Eastern Oregon. Richard Brautigan's rugged, experimental, very funny The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western begins as a travelogue of turn-of-the-century frontier life and makes a drastic shift to the surreal when the two gunmen (who don't put any lace on their killings) reach their sinister assignment.

Artist and American Western history expert David Lambert is on hand to offer his take on whether countercultural cult poet/novelist Brautigan passes muster as a western writer, or if Hawkline Monster is a xerox copy of an audacious literary achievement. Lambert talks with hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs about the unmistakable Brautigan-ness of the novel, how the book fares when it moves into much stranger territory in its second half, and the fascinating decades-spanning background of multiple failed movie adaptations.

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Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two”

Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"