Haints Stay is nothing if not gritty. Colin Winnette’s novel focuses on a pair of brothers, Brooke and Sugar, professional murderers who spend their days doing other people’s dirty work. They ask very few questions and seemingly find neither pleasure nor disgust in their task, as long as they earn enough coin to feed themselves and put a roof over their heads, at least once in a while.

The story opens with the pair returning to town, ready to be paid and bathed. Instead they find the place in ruins and under the rule of a sinister tiny man and his thugs. Things soon turn ugly, causing the brothers to flee into the wild, only to run into further danger and strife. The focal point of this trouble begins when they wake one morning to a strange, seemingly amnesiac boy (whom they christen Bird) who has quite literally nothing, not even clothes. Bird exists at the opposite pole as the brothers, his blank, unknowing innocence juxtaposing the killers’ world-weary ruthlessness perfectly. He’s not even afraid, which the brothers are soon to put right:

“‘My brother is trying to scare you.’

‘Why?’ asked the boy.

‘Because you’re wrong not be be frightened of two men sleeping in the woods,’ said Sugar. ‘Especially these two men.'”

Things soon stray into even darker and stranger territory, as Winnette exercises his plain and unflinching language to detail all manner of violence and terror, from marauding bandits to a nightmarish boogeyman in the woods. It’s a dangerous game to compare anyone to Cormac McCarthy, a man almost closer to the authors of the old testament than contemporary fiction, but Winnette’s prose has that same calculated indifference, twisted characters held at arms length and captured with a cold and unlikely logic.

From a brilliant line on the very first page (“Each night, Brooke counted the stars until he fell asleep and woke blinded by the one”), Winnette paints the desperate, surreal fringes of the American West in prose that possesses not just heft and weight but also an undeniable beauty.

Haints Stay shares that backwoods weirdness of McCarthy’s early work, the characters existing at a violent and isolated edge of society,  plus strains of Blood Meridian, particularly during the brothers’ plain philosophising on the nature of killing and death. Take for example the passage in which Brooke and Bird are stalking a deer:

“You’re going to feel a certain kind of pride, a sense of accomplishment. But you’re also going to feel uneasy with that, as if there’s something wrong with it. There isn’t. Its as natural as breathing. That guilt is all fear anyway. Fear that one day you’re going to be on the receiving end of a blow, and the sudden wish that no one had to do that kind of thing ever.”

Needless to say things twist and turn as the story progresses, as both future and past is revealed. You’ll have to read it to find out what happens, but expect sudden snows, severed limbs and even childbirth. Oh and killing. Lots of killing.

The music I’ve chosen to accompany Haints Stay attempts to capture an atmosphere, that dark underbelly of America that has been expressed through folk music for years. Some of these songs are classics, others released this year, and all hold links (at least in my mind) to the novel.

Tracklisting:

1) Let’s Burn Down the Cornfield – Randy Newman
2) Hang Me, Oh Hang Me – Dave van Ronk
3) Trouble Comes Knocking – Timber Timbre
4) She Goes Alone – Mariposa
5) O Death – Ralph Stanley
6) Us – Western Skies Motel
7) Death to Everyone (Bonnie “Prince” Billy cover) – Psalmships
8) War Paint – Water Liars
9) Sugar Baby – Dock Boggs
10) Satan is Real – The Louvin Brothers

Haints Stay is out now on No Exit Press (UK) and Two Dollar Radio (USA). Buy direct from the publisher via the links or ask at your favourite independent bookshop.

The post Lit Links: Colin Winnette – Haints Stay appeared first on Various Small Flames.

O, Annihilator sees Tirey use an ambient/drone backing that gives the songs a more cinematic feel, pushing the boundaries of folk music while still retaining that traditional quality. As a result, the album could fall into that dreaded category of “experimental”. However, this isn’t experimental in the usual sense, where incongruous sounds are played in the hope of finding some strange off-centre union. O, Annihilator may bring technology into traditional folk but it does so in a harmonious way, where every ambient drone sounds natural and vital to the atmosphere of the track.

Tirey’s previous two releases have been instrumental, so it is very nice to hear the man sing again. He has this tremulous singing voice and he delivers his lines with a real earnestness. Sometimes lovelorn, sometimes weary, he sounds (and writes) a lot older that he actually is. It brings to mind a description of old-time folk singer Dock Boggs by writer William Gay in an essay for Oxford American (and part of the wonderful collection, Time Done Been Won’t Be No More),

“Boggs’s voice here sounds so dissociated it seems to be coming not just from some other time but from outside time itself.”

I’m no folk scholar, so I may be very wrong here, but for me ‘traditional folk’ is less about a particular instrument or sound and more centred on an attitude, a way of writing and playing that exists well beyond the banjo or steel guitar. Tirey writes the sort of songs that sound like oral histories, passed down to him to be passed on again, owned by no-one, there for anyone to interpret.  They sound like the remembered words of forgotten men.

You can buy the album now from Full Spectrum Records, either digitally via Bandcamp or on limited edition cassette.

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