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Humans and ghosts inhabit the pages of author J. E. Weiner’s “The Wretched and Undone” with equal panache. Her debut novel tells the story of a Polish immigrant family in the Texan town of Bandera, known as the “cowboy capital of the world,” set around the eve of the Civil War. Themes like assimilation, faith, family, history and horror are prominent throughout the book.
“It’s a frontier story … a quintessential American story,” said the Palo Alto-based author, who is a trained historian and has a “very full” day job as fundraiser at Stanford University; she works as a senior associate vice president in medical center development.
It was a Stanford Continuing Studies class she took on novel writing that got her started on this book. She said she found a mentor and friend in Lynn Stegner, one of the teachers in the program.
Published by History Through Fiction, a boutique press based in Minneapolis, Weiner’s novel is a work of historical fiction and is positioned to straddle multiple genres, including Southern Gothic, Western and Texas Noir.
“It is a love letter to the Texas Hill Country and to the state and area I grew up in,” said Weiner, who spent her early years in Dallas. “When you read Westerns, it’s very similar to the Ten Commandments; that’s the closest thing to analogize it to. And there’s a ‘Code of the West’ element to this book.”
As a reader she enjoys “gallows humor” and “darkly comedic books” and counts titles like “The Glutton” by A. K. Blakemore and “The Sisters Brothers” by Patrick deWitt among her favorites, alongside the works of authors like Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, Larry McMurtry, Jim Nesbitt and Baron Birtcher.
For this novel, which took Weiner around four years to research and write, she gleaned material from several historical sources including contemporary memoirs, old interviews of locals, and accounts of family history from the region. She found the work of J. Marvin Hunter, a journalist and founder of the Frontier Times Museum in Bandera, particularly helpful. “He interviewed all of these Polish founders in the town,” she said, referring to books like “Pioneer History of Bandera County: Seventy-Five Years of Intrepid History,” that gave her insight into the lives of the early settlers of the place. “They told the stories of their lives, their hardships and what they faced.”
Given the fact that a revenge-seeking specter is one of the characters in the book, how is the author ensuring she doesn’t alienate the skeptics?
“Some of the people who I consider to be skeptics, they still watch ‘Star Trek’ and there’s no such thing as Klingons to the best of our knowledge, right?” she said. “There are ways in which you can suspend your disbelief when you read literature and anything that’s fictionalized is, ultimately, not necessarily reality. “
That said, Weiner does bring her share of real-life ghost stories to the table. Her grandmother, for instance, who lived on a farm in Pennsylvania, near Gettysburg — a borough known for haunted houses and strange sightings — claimed to have seen the ghosts of Civil War soldiers on the property, she said. Her sister also claims to have seen a ghost, not unlike the floating figure in white on the front cover of the book, at her ranch in Bandera.
Weiner has had a couple of first-hand spooky encounters, too. Besides a “footsteps going up the stairs” anecdote from childhood, she has had a memorable run-in with an apparition as an adult, during one of her visits to her grandmother’s house as a college student, she said.
“I was sleeping in my mother’s old childhood bedroom and I’m telling you, I woke up to someone laying on top of me, face in my face, feeling like the wind is being sucked out of my lungs,” she said, about a very visceral experience that has informed one of the scenes in the book. “It was really dark in the room but there was a blackness around in the shape of a head.”
Even so, the novel is not a “supernatural, paranormal, caught-on-camera kind of story,” she said, explaining that the ghosts in the novel serve as metaphoric manifestations of good and evil.
“They’re metaphors for the struggles that the characters in the book are undertaking, the demons they confront and the angels that they need. … I also think they represent the notion of forces beyond our control — whether of this world or not, up to you — that confront our moral compass, our sense of right and wrong, our sense of self versus family and community, and the struggles that we face in those black-and-white moments of our lives,” she said. “So I think there’s a way in which you can thread that needle even if you’re not a believer.”
Learn more about the author and “The Wretched and Undone” at jeweiner.com.
