Haints Stay

by Colin Winnette

Overview

"In his astonishing portrait of American violence, Haints Stay, Colin Winnette makes use of the Western genre to stunning effect. But this isn't a chummy oater penned by the likes of Zane Grey or Louis L'Amour. Winnette's frontier feels more Homeric. His knack for tapping into scenes of primal fear and poetic violence serves as an indictment of our species' base nature and worst instincts. While the novel flouts most of the conventions of the traditional horse opera, the rewards of Haints Stay belong to the reader."
—Jim Ruland, Los Angeles Times

"Striking and powerful... a Western as reimagined through the transgressive lens of Dennis Cooper. What Winnette does here is less about undermining the traditions of the Westerns and more about pushing them in unexpected directions."
—Tobias Carroll, Electric Literature

"The most anticipated independent novel of the summer."
—Flavorwire

"Winnette’s already sharp prose is honed here to a razor edge. It rolls across the stark, lawless world he evokes like approaching thunder."
—Midnight Breakfast

Brooke and Sugar are killers. Bird is the boy who mysteriously woke beside them while between towns. For miles, there is only desert and wilderness, and along the fringes, people.

The story follows the middling bounty hunters after they've been chased from town, and Bird, each in pursuit of their own sense of belonging and justice. It features gunfights, cannibalism, barroom piano, a transgender birth, a wagon train, a stampede, and the tenuous rise of the West's first one-armed gunslinger.

Haints Stay is a new acid western in the tradition of Rudolph Wurlitzer, Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man: meaning it is brutal, surreal, and possesses an unsettling humor.

Colin Winnette is the author of Revelation, Animal Collection, and Fondly—which was listed among Salon's Best Books of 2013. He is an associate editor of PANK Magazine, and conducts a regular interview series for the Believer's "Logger." His writing has appeared on BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, and in the Believer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937512323
Publisher:	Two Dollar Radio
Publication date:	06/02/2015
Pages:	212
Sales rank:	397,116
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Colin Winnette is the author of five books, including the SPD-bestseller Coyote (Les Figues) and Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio). He was the winner of Les Figues Press's 2014 NOS Book Contest, as well as a finalist for Gulf Coast Magazine's Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's First Book Award. His writing has appeared in Lucky Peach, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, The American Reader, and numerous other publications and anthologies. He worked as a bookseller for most of his adult life, in Texas, New York, Vermont, and California. He lives San Francisco. More information can be found online at www.colinwinnette.net.

Editorial Reviews

04/06/2015
Like many of the frontier lives it chronicles, Winnette’s new novel (after Coyote) is short and brutish. Its two main characters, the brothers Brooke and Sugar, are contract killers, operating in and around the Western everyville of Wolf Creek (in an unspecified period of America’s past resembling the Wild West). After their latest kill, they flee into the wilderness, where they are joined briefly by Bird, an adolescent boy with no memory of his past. A series of violent encounters entangles the three in the dog-eat-dog environment of the West, including pursuit by henchmen and their eventual capture by vigilante bounty hunters. Before the novel ends, there’s cannibalism, an amputation, a bloody jailhouse shoot-out, a surprise birth, and the slaughter of a town’s entire population. There is little romance to the Wild West as Winnette depicts it: the landscape is all “rock and vastness,” and “between each of the towns was pure wilderness, and what came bearing down upon civilization was beyond imagination.” Winnette’s laconic observations about his characters—he describes the young Brooke and Sugar as “not being good boys... on the cusp of not becoming good men”—and their bleak personal philosophy (“there was no logic to life and no road that could take you straight elsewhere”) accentuate the grimness of this portrait of the frontier as a place where desperation and death were always near at hand. (June)

Publishers Weekly

2015-03-21
Life is nasty, brutish, and short in this noir-tinged Western about a pair of coldblooded killers out on the trail. After exploring domestic drama earlier this year, Winnette (Coyote, 2015, etc.) returns with something completely different in this blood-spattered Western that falls somewhat uncomfortably between Deadwood and The Crying Game. We're immediately introduced to Brooke and Sugar, two brothers who have survived a childhood of horrific abuse and now make their livings as contract killers. Brooke is brusque but profanely efficient, while the sickly Sugar is more fragile but articulate. "Well, I'm a student of history," Sugar says, "and any observant man can see that power is like a gold coin. Some men squander it, throw it away on nothing worth noticing. Others simply lose it to a world that's much hungrier for it than they are. Others still dedicate their lives to holding onto it. And some die, coin in hand, surrendering it only to the men who bury them." After a skirmish in town, they find themselves on the run through the woods, where they meet a 13-year-old they name Bird, who has no memory of his own past. It sounds like a cross between Daniel Woodrell and Elmore Leonard right up until Winnette flips the script: Sugar is no brother at all but instead biologically a woman who was raised and identifies as a man. And that nausea and convulsions he's having? Yep, Sugar is pregnant with her own brother's child. It's a pretty raw set of circumstances, treated matter-of-factly, but Winnette portrays his serial killers with an odd grace and punctuates his circular narrative with murders, revenge killings, a shooting spree, and a heroic arc for wannabe gunslinger Bird that is broadly, darkly humorous. That title is a Southern colloquialism for "lost soul," and Winnette certainly sends his hard men down some long, dark roads.

Kirkus Reviews