[In the following review, Treadwell mentions that although Warlock is somewhat lacking in plot, it is ambitious and is salvaged by Harrison's incredible wit.]

Warlock is a comic novel which rests on the premise that beneath the slick and sophisticated surface of American life the old nature gods still exercise their capricious power. This fauns-in-the-shopping-mall territory has been explored before, by writers as various as John Cheever, Peter De Vries and John Irving, but the landscape is a rich one, and to it Jim Harrison has brought a fresh and original eye.

Johnny Lundgren, the novel's central character, is forty-two and lives in rural Northern Michigan with Diana, his glamorous second wife. He has worked as an executive for a family foundation but the revenue authorities have come to view these institutions as elaborate tax-avoidance schemes, and Lundgren has been unemployed for a year, living on his wife's earnings as a nurse. Lundgren leads an elaborate fantasy life centered on his private identity as “Warlock”, a secret name given him in boyhood during a cub-scout initiation ceremony. As the novel opens, he is emerging from a powerful and mysterious dream at the climax of which a voice from the earth has commanded him to change his future. He finds the idea a compelling one, but in spite of the magical and diabolical associations of his secret name, Lundgren-Warlock does not find it easy to take charge of his own destiny.

It is his wife, more intelligent and energetic than himself, who at length finds him a job with the sinister Dr Rabun, a millionaire inventor whose masterpiece is “an absurdly effective prosthetic device for men made impotent by severe diabetes and other biological rather than imaginary causes”, and whose weird balloon-like shoes may well hide cloven feet. Lundgren is to act as a sort of private detective, defending the far-flung outposts of Dr Rabun's financial empire from the depredations of swindlers and bloodsuckers, chief among whom are the doctor's hostile wife and homosexual son.

As a job for a fantasist this could hardly be bettered, and Lundgren sets out on the trail—the lone wanderer, master of his fate and captain of his soul. For a time, he's successful (though his successes depend more on chance encounters and coincidence than on his own enterprise) but as the novel reaches its climax, life turns bafflingly perverse. Nothing is as it appears to be, nothing has been as it seemed; life and the future won't be imposed upon, and the novel ends with Lundgren's acquiescence in his own bewilderment.

Warlock carries an epigraph from A Midsummer Night's Dream, the lines in which Bottom speaks of having had “a most rare vision … a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was.” Like Bottom's, Lundgren's dream is misleading and only partially understood; misleading because the boundaries between dream and reality are blurred. Both Bottom and Lundgren become actors in a fatal tragedy of love which, by their own incompetence, they reduce to farce; both are fools with access to an instinctive wisdom denied to the wiser folk around them.

In wishing to change his future, Lundgren aspires to change the world. We are told that “on a mostly subconscious level he was vitally concerned with the world conforming to his idea of it.” This ambition allies him to another potent literary archetype, the Knight of La Mancha (Lundgren characteristically prefers his story in the Broadway-musical form his wife finds disgusting) who travels over the landscape in a doomed attempt to impose a set of crazy but noble ideals on recalcitrant everyday reality. Lundgren's dreams are less than chivalric, but they are generous and humane. There is nothing evil about Lundgren, and “Warlock” is at this level an inappropriate way for him to think of himself. But Harrison is a self-conscious writer and knows that “warlock” derives from the Old English wárloga which means, literally, “liar against the truth”, and thus gets at Lundgren's refusal (like Bottom's and Don Quixote's) to see his relationship with the rest of the world in an objective light. Out of this refusal comes comedy, but something deeper too.

Warlock is an ambitious novel, and it must be said that the plot is a bit too slight for the thematic weight it is expected to bear. What satisfies most, perhaps, is the author's vigorous and often acerbic wit. This comment on changing fashions in adolescent reading-matter is a representative example: “After all, the most obnoxious young people are those who read Thomas Wolfe and take that great burly oaf to heart. In the following generation Kahlil Gibran and Hermann Hesse were to cause fewer problems, albeit their brand of pap seemed to cause early senescence among the young.” Exactly so.