Colin Winnette's Haints Stay Is A Solid, Layered Work of Genre-defying Beauty

““Left to their own devices, people will live out every pos­sible variation of a human life.” ”

— from Colin Winnette’s Haints Stay

Every possible variation. The unexpectedness of Colin Winnette’s fiction is nothing less than thrilling; so much so that I fear writing this review will steal this thrill from you. Haints Stay is a western; this is the first surprise I must apologize for ruining. And as westerns go, there’s quite a lot of shooting and choking and . . . well . . . gnawing, but this will come as no surprise to you if you’ve read Winnette’s prize-winning Coyote and the two novellas collected in Fondly. Exploring the instinct to kill has always been there in Winnette’s stories. Haints Stay begins with Sugar and Brooke, two carnivorous killers wandering towards civilization, but I see these two characters as a sort of parental unit to the main story—which belongs, in my opinion, to the character of Bird, a naked boy dropped out of nowhere into the care of killers.

Haints Stay is a solid, layered work of genre-defying beauty—albeit a bit of a gory one at times; there is that. The overall work is circular like an absurdist play, returning to the same towns, the same camps, the same crime scenes; but also the same characters and their similar pursuits: killing, avenging, slaughtering. There is the exception of Mary, Bird’s fake wife, who hates killing and hates spiders, which is one of the funniest parts of this book by the way. As always in Winnette’s fiction, “horridness and dread” are tempered with razor-sharp wit and purpose.

We’re let in on this purpose by the character of Brooke. As he’s wandering through the desert, he muses that there has been a lot of middle in the tales of his killing but not much beginning or end. And that’s exactly how the tales wind through Haints Stay, edges “worn and indistinguishable”. This doesn’t stop him, though, from expecting things to end in total devastation; and more often than not, in this narrative, they do. True to this purpose, it is actually Bird’s story that has no beginning and no end but lots of middle.

Bird—as his name suggests—is a grotesque programmed to kill, but also to seek safety and food. His character, along with all of Winnette’s creations, is original and meticulously drawn, mostly through dialogue. Winnette’s dialogue uses repetition and stark, simple phrasing to reduce the characters’ motivations to instinctual impulses: “I want to kill it.” “Are we safe?” These phrases, and others like them, are guiding refrains in this story.

The most frequent refrain is Bird’s line that he’s going to be ready for anything that comes at him. That’s what his known life—his time with Sugar and Brooke and his not-so-pleasant time in the cave (which I’ll let you discover yourself)—has taught him: to be ready for anything that comes at him. “‘Lots of things are going to come at you,’ said Mary. ‘It is only the world saying hello.'” But Bird, who’s been crippled by the world, doesn’t really see it this way. The world sometimes—often really—wants to hurt you. And most of what comes at you is not what it seems.

In fact, the characters in Haints Stay are often not what or who they seem: complete strangers who pass as husband and wife and who later live more like brother and sister, children who aren’t really their parents’ children. Relationships come and go and seem to mean something for the moment but then morph, become meaningless after the next violent act. As important as these false relationships are to this narrative, an emotionless lack of self-awareness is even more central. The best example of this is Bird, who simply appears with no knowledge of who he is or where he came from, but there’s also Mary, another child with no past; there’s Sugar, who doesn’t even know his own gender. These are simple-minded creatures occupied with the satisfaction of their most basic needs.

Like food, water, and safety. The bands of marauders, wagon trains and ranch families spend most of their narratives worrying about where their next meal will come from, whether it’s safe to eat or drink. But there is also music; there is Martha, Bird’s fake mother and Brooke’s fake wife. Her piano playing serves as a placeholder for the sublime: for the feminine, for the civilizing of the lost and violent masculine—masculinized?—soul.

Most of the characters in this story are lost souls—as the title of the book suggests—in between towns, in the wilderness, wandering. Migrating? Like migratory birds? Wild animals? Herds? Creatures who are most dangerous when they happen upon oases of civilization? I think I could remove all these question marks, but I’m still trying not to ruin the surprises in this brilliant work of art.

And speaking of art, there’s a touch of surrealism in this story. I want to leave you with the conceit of a seemingly pointless, freestanding spiral staircase with an eagle sculpture at its base—a bird; the association is unavoidable. It’s in the middle of the town where Bird finds work as a killer. Does it lead to the higher calling that Martha pities the birds for not having? Or is it merely another metaphor for a life leading nowhere? A path of no certain origin and no apparent destination. But lots of middle.

Speak of Fondly: A Review of Colin Winnette's Fondly

To say that the two novellas in Colin Winnette’s Fondly are unrelated would be an understatement, as each is wholly different from the other in style, tone, substance, voice, character, plot – pretty much any identifiable feature.  In the current fiction marketplace, this type of range is rare.  Story collections are looked upon with more favor if the pieces are “linked” by some ostensible trait like setting or character or theme, or otherwise cobbled into an illusory whole that will be more satisfying to the reader (at least that’s what I suspect is the motive).

This is why Fondly is such a breath of fresh air.  The disparate novellas display a writer unafraid of diversity and capable of honing the unique voice that each story dictates.

The first novella, titled In One Story, the Two Sisters, is singular in its scope and presentation.  Dispensing with plot, the tale consists of a series of vignettes that are by turns surreal, hilarious, and heartbreaking.  The tie that binds is the presence of the titular two sisters, who morph into an array of shapes, people, and situations, each foregrounded by the vignette titles, which are meant to be taken literally:  For instance, in “In one story, the two sisters are Olympic swimmers,” the sisters spend their time swimming literally across an ocean as part of their training.  Among their crew are a writer, a Navigator, and a nefarious young man who introduces them to the gustatory joys of raw Orca meat.

The situations range from the mundane (“In one story, the two sisters decided to take a trip together”) to the absurd (“In one story, the two sisters were an olive at the bottom of a dirty martini and were clipped in two by a set of large teeth”) to the comically specific (“In one story, the two sisters were reasonably well-behaved nuns”).

Many of the vignettes bear the sheen of folk tales, set in forests or farms or old homes, with characters only referred to as “the old man” or “the younger sister” and so on.  And yet even this folk tale aspect doesn’t remain predictable, as some of the pieces feature trappings of the modern world such as computers, Mickey Mouse, and country music played on tape deck of a kidnapper’s car.  The result is a pleasantly strange experience for the reader, perhaps not for folks who desire easy connections and conventional narrative arcs.  But the novella will surprise and challenge, and Winnette’s prose is restrained yet artful:

She let her nails grow until they were tools.  Her hair’s gone wild.  She’s thin as a rake, holding out day after day for that smack of warm pumpkin, of spiced apple.  The sound of the wind is her asking kindly, plaintively, for the treat.  The scratching sound is her losing her patience.  The shatter comes when it’s already too late. (57)

The second novella, Gainsville, is more conventional, although it also takes risks:  most notably, the story is structured like a chain.  For example, we begin with Sonny and his unnamed brother, who progress quickly through adolescence until the brother has a child named Jiminy.  Then the story moves on to Jiminy; after eight pages, he has become an adult.  The focus shifts to Jiminy’s ex-girlfriend, who bears Jiminy’s child Osiris but raises him with a different father.  We follow Osiris’s sister Magdelene for a while, and so on.  Once we leave behind a character, we never encounter them again.

What connects the characters, and what propels the story forward, are the trappings of growing up – primarily the hormonal, sexual, and social pressures of adolescence – but also of finding one’s way through the world.  The home lives are grim and unsentimental, and the people in Gainsville’s universe constantly suffer in the wake of their parents’ (and their own) mistakes.  They get hooked on meth; they vandalize neighbors’ houses; they impregnate their teenage babysitters.  Whether or not they are redeemed is beside the point.  They are flawed and human, and therefore they are worth inhabiting.

In contrast to the first novella, Winnette’s prose is sparse:

The phone call was an update on the cat’s behavior.  She was moodier than usual.  She wasn’t eating much.  He was worried.  The next was an automated voice.  He let it play out while he scrubbed the cups and the bowls in the sink.  He pried the dried food loose with his fingernails.  The voicemail ended.  His girlfriend clicked on.  She was feeling better.  The whole thing was terrifying.  She’d thought she was going to die.  She could have died.  You don’t get many second chances in life. (174)

The universe of Gainsville is one in which humanity is displayed not through grand gestures or investment in individual failure or success, but rather through each new generation’s stubborn, irrevocable drive to simply exist, and to find in the smallest moments of affection the threads that tie us to everyone who lives in the shadows of our failures.