Haints Stay

April 6, 2015
Like many of the frontier lives it chronicles, Winnette’s new novel (after Coyote) is short and brutish. Its two main characters, the brothers Brooke and Sugar, are contract killers, operating in and around the Western everyville of Wolf Creek (in an unspecified period of America’s past resembling the Wild West). After their latest kill, they flee into the wilderness, where they are joined briefly by Bird, an adolescent boy with no memory of his past. A series of violent encounters entangles the three in the dog-eat-dog environment of the West, including pursuit by henchmen and their eventual capture by vigilante bounty hunters. Before the novel ends, there’s cannibalism, an amputation, a bloody jailhouse shoot-out, a surprise birth, and the slaughter of a town’s entire population. There is little romance to the Wild West as Winnette depicts it: the landscape is all “rock and vastness,” and “between each of the towns was pure wilderness, and what came bearing down upon civilization was beyond imagination.” Winnette’s laconic observations about his characters—he describes the young Brooke and Sugar as “not being good boys... on the cusp of not becoming good men”—and their bleak personal philosophy (“there was no logic to life and no road that could take you straight elsewhere”) accentuate the grimness of this portrait of the frontier as a place where desperation and death were always near at hand.

April 1, 2015
Life is nasty, brutish, and short in this noir-tinged Western about a pair of coldblooded killers out on the trail. After exploring domestic drama earlier this year, Winnette (Coyote, 2015, etc.) returns with something completely different in this blood-spattered Western that falls somewhat uncomfortably between Deadwood and The Crying Game. We're immediately introduced to Brooke and Sugar, two brothers who have survived a childhood of horrific abuse and now make their livings as contract killers. Brooke is brusque but profanely efficient, while the sickly Sugar is more fragile but articulate. "Well, I'm a student of history," Sugar says, "and any observant man can see that power is like a gold coin. Some men squander it, throw it away on nothing worth noticing. Others simply lose it to a world that's much hungrier for it than they are. Others still dedicate their lives to holding onto it. And some die, coin in hand, surrendering it only to the men who bury them." After a skirmish in town, they find themselves on the run through the woods, where they meet a 13-year-old they name Bird, who has no memory of his own past. It sounds like a cross between Daniel Woodrell and Elmore Leonard right up until Winnette flips the script: Sugar is no brother at all but instead biologically a woman who was raised and identifies as a man. And that nausea and convulsions he's having? Yep, Sugar is pregnant with her own brother's child. It's a pretty raw set of circumstances, treated matter-of-factly, but Winnette portrays his serial killers with an odd grace and punctuates his circular narrative with murders, revenge killings, a shooting spree, and a heroic arc for wannabe gunslinger Bird that is broadly, darkly humorous. That title is a Southern colloquialism for "lost soul," and Winnette certainly sends his hard men down some long, dark roads.