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.

Tracklisting:

1) Evening Loving – Jenny Gillespie
2) Luxury – Patio
3) Low – Yours Are The Only Ears
4) Either Way – Sorority Noise
5) Home at Last – The Sports
6) Braver – Sally Fowler
7) Chow Chow – FAYE
8) Meant – Spartan Jet-Plex
9) Stained Glass Eye – The Dead Tongues
10) October – These Bashful Claws
11) Bad Vibrations – Naps
12) Baked Goods – Young Jesus
13) Heroine – BB Cream
14) Winona Death Ryder – Boy Problems (No Dice Tapes comp)
15) The Only Other Girl From Back Home – Advance Base
16) When it Feels – Soft Spell (STAY RAD SAV comp)
17) The Unnatural – Claire Cronin
18) Same Old Ocean – Crabapple
19) Diet Coke – Lake Michigan
20) Ferris Beuller – Flatsound
21) See Good – Jobless
22) Anything but Yourself – Tom Greenwood
23) Under the Mountain II – Mermaidens
24) Liars – Gregory Alan Isakov
25) Warning Sign – Mikko Joensuu
26) Candy – Fish Food
27) White Gold – Good Good Blood
28) We Bury Our Dead Alive – Coping Skills
29) Joke/Rope – Haybaby
30) Slacker – Will B & the Teen Creeps
31) Double Bacon Cheeseburger – Yikes
32) All I Have – Derek Ted
33) Try Hard – Hovvdy
34) Dark & Gloomy – Horse Teeth
35) Migratory Birds – Western Skies Motel
36) Endless Wave – Hanging Valleys

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One of the strengths of Settlers is its ability to wordlessly conjure images, most often evocations of life on the American landscape. Pinning specific thoughts and scenes to instrumental music is a dangerous game, as like all art it’s obviously open to interpretation, but you can’t help but let your brain wander over what it might mean. To me it sounds unmistakably rural, vast plains viewed through a wide-angled lens. Take for example, ‘Migratory Birds’,which sounds like the sensation of watching the grey sheets of an approaching storm blow across a stubbled prairie, birds buffeted in the eddies of the autumnal breeze as they take to the wing to leave for winter.

This isn’t folk music that makes you feel enclosed in a rickety old barn or smoky barroom, but instead gives the sensation of viewing the landscape from a choice vantage point, a dusty window or quiet hillside. The tracks sound brown and grey and straw-yellow, recalling words like arid and hardscrabble and timeworn, sounding as if they have been around as long as the hills that inspired them. As the label’s blurb put it:

“[The] delicate ecosystem of these songs…feels as organic and nuanced as that of the natural world. Just as a tree’s leaves wither and fall; a fire sparks and expands only to expend its last bit of fuel, extinguished and left for ash. So true are the parallels we find in our own existence, the complex ritual of growing old and returning to dirt. Decay is inevitable for all life, yet through this it becomes the rich soil for all things proceeding”

As well as the surface imagery there is also something else, something shadowy and strange, that pervades the album. The fingerpicked guitar work is downright hypnotic, dancing campfire flames of sound that tumble on hidden rhythms as if by their own volition. There is also a nagging, lingering noise that adds a sense of trouble or weirdness, a reminder that even the most rudimentary communities harbour secrets. ‘Two Worlds’ is probably the best example of this, the usual guitar sitting on top of a sound that sounds immediately bigger, an almost geological shearing sound that eventually drowns out all else.

And, although this is primarily a guitar album, some of the songs are not guitar-based at all, like ‘Whelm’, which swells with an ambient majesty, the end of ‘Whirl’ which sounds caught on a spiralling breeze, and the closing track ‘After a Storm’, which is thick with droning harmonium that brightens as the track’s eight minutes progress, like the sun slowly peeking over the horizon after a night of gales and thunder.

Western Skies Motel has made a great album, one which conjures a land that’s as hard and unforgiving as it is beautiful. This is music that has dust in its cracks, that tastes like dry, sun-baked earth. Settlers is out now on Lost Tribe Sound. As usual with the label, you can order it on beautiful 12″ vinyl which is almost as much an art package as a music medium (but has sadly sold out – badger the label for a second press), on CD, or as a digital download via the Western Skies Motel Bandcamp page.

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