Haints Stay

An imaginative, acid western from a rising star in the indie lit world.

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.


Advance praise:

"Haints Stay puts to mind the very best contemporary novels of the old West, including those by powerhouses like Charles Portis, Patrick DeWitt, Robert Coover, Oakley Hall, E.L. Doctorow and Sheriff Cormac McCarthy himself, not to mention Thomas McGuane’s classic screenplays for The Missouri Breaks and Tom Horn. But Colin Winnette has his own dark and delightful and surprising agenda. Be wary. He might be the new law in town.” —Sam Lipsyte, author of The Fun Parts and The Ask

"I loved it. Loved it! Haints Stay had me from the very first line—the visceral ante upped and crescendoing nearly every page. Humor, gore, that wonderful unsettling feeling you get when you're reading a book that excites you and kind of scares you as well? Yes, please." —Lindsay Hunter, author of Ugly Girls and Don't Kiss me

"From his curiously harrowing Animal Collection to the glorious guts of Fondly, I trust wherever Colin Winnette’s imagination sees fit to take me. And now — with Haints Stay — we venture to the lawless old West for a story stitched out of animal skins and language that glimmers like blood diamonds. This is a dangerous novel; let’s read it and risk our lives together." —Saeed Jones, author of Prelude to Bruise

"Funny, brutal and haunting, Haints Stay takes the traditional Western, turns it inside out, eviscerates it, skins it, and then wears it as a duster. This is the kind of book that would make Zane Grey not only roll over in his grave but rise undead from the ground with both barrels blazing." —Brian Evenson

"If the Western genre could be thought of as a pile of old stones, this book is a particular piece of lovely spit-shined agate at the top, gleaming in invitation, and under its glow the others are changed." —Amelia Gray, author of Threats and Gutshot

Colin Winnette is the author of Revelation, Animal Collection, and Fondly—which was listed among Salon's Best Books of 2013. He is an associate editor of PANK Magazine, and conducts a regular interview series for the Believer's "Logger." His writing has appeared on BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, and in the Believer.