Haints Stay

Written by Colin Winnette

Narrated by Eric G. Dove

"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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Mar 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543677843

Colin Winnette

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.

Reviews for Haints Stay

[Stephen Kastner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Terrific book written very much in the style of a classic Western, but with a very modern and timely twist..

[Joey Eggleton · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Most likely written by an AI that was given Cormac McCarthy novels by somebody who ate entirely too many crayons as a kid.

[rivercityreading · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Brothers Brooke and Sugar roam from town to town, killing on contract, when they encounter a boy unable to remember where he came from. They give him the name Bird and bring him along on their journey, which takes the trio in different, and unexpected, directions.

Though Haints Stay's ambiguous setting feels familiar, it isn't quite the dry, dusty Western we've come to know. Brutal violence replaces the pop of guns and surprises hide on nearly every page. Starting with the early reveal that Sugar was born female but lives life as a man, Winnette gives his characters fascinating depth and masterfully pushes the novel far outside the genre's boundaries.

"But he had not learned the stars. He had not even tried. He might have tried more, he thought. He might have retained a few things here and there, instead of always just doing what he was good at and never learning anything. He cursed himself for being good at things that got you by."

Winnette's staccato style works well for highlighting the lives of quiet men more comfortable with killing than conversation. And much like those quiet killers, there's a more complex beauty behind the simplicity: "...Brooke counted the stars until he fell asleep and woke blinded by the one." With Haints Stay, Colin Winnette encourages us to embrace the unexpected, as gritty, violent, and dark as it may be.