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“The real trouble with walking a long ways is that you usually have to walk back.��

WARLOCK has been my introduction to the work of Jim Harrison, who everyone seemed to love. I wish it had not been my first read of his.

The plot-Johnny Lundgren is an unemployed executive in Michigan in 1980. Eventually he is employed by a doctor his wife (a surgical nurse) works with to do odds and ends “investigations�� of sorts. Oh, and Johnny is obsessed with sex, thinks about sex, seems to have no life outside of thinking about and pursuing it.

The book is divided into 3 parts. Part one…ugh. Navel gazing of the worst sort. Parts Two and Three…well at least something happens (thus the two stars) and they move quickly.

The text has a dry, drool noir feel to it. And it is vulgar, ridiculously so since I could not really find a point to it. If Harrison had cut out sexual references the book would have been 100 pages shorter. That’s a lot of sex in a 279 page book, and not a lot of story. As my friend Kim said of this book, “I found it artificially crude.�� That is it in a nutshell.

I read WARLOCK quickly, and for a book that is a bit all over the place the last paragraph was good. It was a nice way to end this text. Mr. Harrison was obviously a talented man, and I will read him again, but this one is a miss.

I end with some quotes/moments in the text that stuck with me:
�� “He loved to invent statistics, his favorite being that every year in the United States more people die of bad mayonnaise than rattlesnake bite.��
�� “Then life changed with as little reason as it had previously refused to change.��
�� “But then jealousy, after self-pity, is the most destructive human emotion.��
�� “Rare, indeed, is a woman or man so sullied that they can’t be rebaptized with a few drinks, a pizza, and a shower.��