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Haints Stay

Name: Haints Stay
Rating: 4 (1 reviews)
Author: Colin Winnette
ISBN: 9781937512323

Colin Winnette

212 pages

Two Dollar Radio

Jun 2015

Literature & Fiction WSBN

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"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.

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A Punishing, Elegant Tale

If “Haints Stay” is a response to “Sisters Brothers”, it surpasses its predecessor handily. It is more serious, more profound, and far more satisfying at the end. It’s as if Winnette challenged himself to build a book around a humorous reinterpretation of the previous book’s title. Both are about a pair of gunslinging assassins (“sisters brothers” indeed); both describe wild, painful journeys through the early American west; both use clear, elegant, descriptive prose—sparse yet poetic—and both upend the tradition of the western novel in more ways than one. (And one of Winnette’s brothers is even similar in spirit to one of deWitt’s). But the arc of “Haints Stay” is more serious, its message more deep. Upon re-reading “Sisters Brothers”, I realized with disappointment that the book is quite shallow. It's an interesting story, filled with lightness, humor, colorful characters, and compelling anecdotes, but never took me any closer to a deeper understanding of the characters, the world they inhabit, or the world I do. “Haints Stay”, on the other hand, forced me to confront a lot of unpleasant information; it forced me to think about what was meant by the devastating, concluding sentence of the book—the final, foreboding image of the novel. What did it explain about the past? What did it foretell of the future? There's no answer. No interpretation of the book can demonstrate that any evidence leads to any definite conclusion. We're left in the middle of things, forced to consider what we think could (or should) happen, or more interestingly, to wish had never happened. We realize that the ending is the inevitable outcropping of all the events which came before—all those awful, painful, horrible things that happened before—all those things that left an imprint on the actors. Some reviewers here have said that the story falls apart midway, when the brothers and their young friend split up, the three plot threads becoming independent of each other, but I disagree strong...

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