The position is manifest in Ant’s main hobby. The attendance, and enjoyment, of funerals.  Any funeral, for anybody. His own fear of death lifted, Ant finds the dread inherent to the ceremonies to have evaporated, becoming a service not of grim mystery but familiarity. The comfort of the mundane. “The whole show,” Shah writes, “the bouquets and black-out drapes, the living room chapels, the organs droning out dirges to drum machine beats, the discount casket coupons thumbtacked by the phone, padlocked basement door—none of it is morbid, to me, anymore.”

When the younger cousin of Ant’s childhood friend is killed, he finds himself compelled to return to his hometown in Wisconsin after a prolonged absence. The friend, Vince, is unconvinced by his motives, but still collects Ant from O’Hare, and together the pair set off thorough the snow in order to make the service. Only in returning home, Ant is forced to confront that he has not lost everything—a past, a childhood, a network of relationships from which he could never untangle—and that grief can never be truly defanged.

He tries to deflect by settling into the playful macho bickering of his old friendship. He tries to dissociate and pretend that nothing matters. Vince, caught up in his own neuroses, does the same, and the old friends spark against one another as they hurtle towards the final explosion. The result is a farce in which every emotion and motivation is revealed as slightly pathetic. In other words, a farce most human and male. “He really said this to me,” Shah writes towards the end of the narrative. “I couldn’t help giggling a bit. He did too, just before falling to pieces. Everything, and everyone—ridiculous.”

Whiteout Conditions is out now via Two Dollar Radio.

The post Tariq Shah – Whiteout Conditions appeared first on Various Small Flames.

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.