Barry Hannah can succinctly and with great good humor evoke the profound bewilderment of the human condition.

Consider, for example, the husband-narrator of the short story "Love Too Long," from Mr. Hannah's 1978 collection, Airships: "'You great bastard!' I yelled up there. 'I believed in You on and off all my life!'"

This element is still present in Mr. Hannah's ninth book, Never Die: "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Rotten Indian-giver, eh?" one character says.

But Mr. Hannah's sly wit is squandered here. The characters in this novel are undeveloped, and Mr. Hannah's fine, wry insight is wasted when applied to caricatures.

The plot, too, lacks conviction. Set in 1910, it involves a university-educated gunfighter's decision (inspired by boredom and distaste) to burn down his frontier hometown of Nitburg, accurately described by the local chronicler as "a frozen headache of a town where nobody couldn't get no grip on heroism nor even a cause." There is no lack of violence, though—everything from broken kneecaps to decapitation.

Violent imagery, prevalent and disturbing in Mr. Hannah's previous works, is unsettling here, too, but for all the wrong reasons. The perpetrators are presented as if they were the Marx Brothers doing a combination western parody and slasher film.

"I thought Evil was big but it's really a mighty, mighty … small thing," Fernando, the gunfighter, says near the start of Never Die. Mr. Hannah may have been trying to illustrate the point, but he has instead created a confused mishmash of a book that itself seems meanspirited.

"I roam in the past for my best mind," he wrote in his 1980 novel, Ray. Here's hoping he can find it again. Because when, as in Never Die, bad things happen to bad caricatures, who is to care?