Owens makes a cameo appearance in Willy Vlautin’s enigmatic, beautiful “The Horse,” which tells the tale of Al Ward, a grizzled guitarist and recovering alcoholic, and his encounter with a dying horse on an isolated mining claim in the Nevada desert. At Al’s first concert, Owens and the Buckaroos had scrambled his teenage insides; he’d pursued C&W with an electric Telecaster that outlasted his marriages and flings. Now in his 60s, Al’s living in self-imposed exile, stuck amid dawn-to-dusk solitude. “The Horse” taps a wealth of influences — Hemingway, Johnny Cash, John Huston’s film “The Misfits” – but Vlautin’s cadences and wit are his alone, sharp and bracing, like shots of whiskey.

Each day Al wakes to a routine of chores and ideas for songs, pillaging old notebooks from his time on the casino circuit. He hikes through the hills, swills instant coffee, and heats up cans of Campbell’s soup, piquant flavors such as chicken wonton and fiesta nacho cheese. At night he reads faded magazines until he drifts off. Mostly he looks backward: a frustrated adolescence in Reno, shunned by an aloof mother; his passion for his second wife; the glory days when he’d rotated in and out of bands.

Inherited from a great-uncle, the claim feels removed, a former assayer’s office stripped down to a wood stove, piles of National Geographic and Sports Illustrated. There’s a battery-dead ’82 Monte Carlo marooned in the yard. One winter morning Al discovers a blind horse in the road outside his shack, “mane matted and tangled with sagebrush . . . scars were on its legs, on its neck and withers, and a faded brand read Tt on its left hip.” He tries to feed it spaghetti and grass but to no avail: the horse stands stock-still, lipping a bit of snow, wasting away. It bleeds when a coyote nips its leg. It may or may not be real.

Al mulls what to do. He decides a bullet to the skull is more merciful than starvation — to summon courage he breaks his fragile sobriety, tossing back a tumbler of tequila: “He tried to take short sips but finished the drink in two swallows. The relief that alcohol had always given him was still there. Bad nerves to no nerves in one drink.” In the end he can’t pull the trigger. His dilemma is punctuated by vibrant flashbacks, mini-novels in their own right, retracing the path that brought him here.

“The Horse” might have been a familiar meditation on late-life regret, except that Vlautin’s intriguing structure elevates his game. He avoids a strict chronology, shuffling and cutting Al’s story like a deck of cards. The liminal dreamscape of the claim and horse form the narrative’s hub while the flashbacks are spokes that fly to the edge of Al’s consciousness. In his prime, songs had poured forth with the fury of desire. Vlautin cheekily plays with titles: “Bonnie Blacked Out Again,” “When the Mascara Runs,” “Uno, Dos, Tres — I’m Gonna Bust Your Face.” Collectively these titles — and there are a lot — drop clues to Al’s arc. A series of lowlifes had preyed on his naiveté, leveraging his talent for their gain. When he’d reap financial success, Al would burn through the Benjamins on suits, liquor and hotel upgrades. He’d bounced among women, finding happiness with Maxine, a waitress he’d met in Reno. After their divorce and her subsequent suicide, he’d bottomed out on a bender in Lancaster, Calif. His great-uncle had fetched him, and he’d cleared his head.

Pawnshops, sixers of Coors, misbegotten relationships: these details evolve organically from Vlautin’s dual professions as novelist and musician. (In addition to writing fiction he records with the Delines.) He’s a scribe of the underclass, reporting along the margins, teasing melodies from noise and silences. He reflects on whether art can redeem us. “How many notebooks had he filled with half-good songs, songs that were almost?” Al asks himself. “How many hours and months and years had he toiled and tinkered? And Jesus, how many hours had he spent learning cover songs he hated?”

Grounded in music and sex and money (or lack thereof), Al’s memories balance his present-day stasis, urging him forward. Eventually he must reckon with places and people beyond his assayer’s shack and sets off on a journey that skirts the rim of madness. Mythical yet inventive, a struggle between man and beast, “The Horse” follows the playbook of “The Old Man and the Sea” or Julia Phillips’s recent “Bear,” weighing the totemic natural world against the frailties of the human condition.

Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of “This Boy’s Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.” He lives in Brooklyn.