"As codified by Texas literary giants like Walter Prescott Webb and T. R. Fehrenbach, our quasi-religious history has often resembled historical fiction—a triumphalist mythology that a generation of “revisionist” (i.e., factual) historians has largely failed to budge from our collective psyche. Instead, ironically, the task of debunking all those popular misconceptions has fallen to contemporary Western novelists. Historical revisionism, it seems, wears better in cowboy boots; over the past three decades, the nihilistic anti-heroism of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) has evolved into Meyer’s more complex but no less morally desolate frontier, where everyone is either a victim or a thief. While the new offerings by Wittliff, McMurtry, and Guinn are considerably less apocalyptic in tone than McCarthy’s and Meyer’s books, they similarly challenge old-school readers with timely meditations on racism, sexism, and even economic inequality. "

Interesting. I don't necessarily like the "neo" term but agree with the sentiment. The Western genre, in many respects, literally died. And that has to be taken into account when writing in and about the genre:

"Leonard’s novel was written just at the end of what we now remember as the golden age of the Western genre, at a time when the author himself had already migrated to more fresh and vibrant varieties of potboiler. Since then, time has passed, John Wayne has died, and the image of a ranch-dwelling man on horseback has been requisitioned by a series of decreasingly plausible American presidents. Yet the Western itself has never quite gone extinct. It lives on in the form of the neo-Western, the backward-looking descendant of the original species, distinguished above all by its self-awareness as a genre out of time. That is to say, the neo-Western knows that the Western is a dead genre, and it knows that we know it, too. And so it must somehow attempt to answer (implicitly or explicitly, through serious reflection or through mocking parody) the question of how this came to be."

"America's great cowboy epic consists of a hundred thousand simulacra (cast in forms ranging from novels and movies to model kits and lunch boxes) of an imaginary original. At that primal point where other cultures find their Ramayana or Iliad or Le Morte d'Arthur, we make do with rumors and fabrications, replicas of wanted posters and tintypes of miners' shacks, Owen Wister and Zane Grey, and the deathless ideogram of a man on a horse crossing an empty space. Because of this void, the epic can always be written for the first time, the pieces finally put definitively together, even if only at the bitter end, or, indeed, long past the end. If the western died some time ago, that death was only a way station in this longer cycle of unappeasable striving after the Total Western, whether it materializes as Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Gilbert Sorrentino's Gold Fools, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, or the HBO series Deadwood."

An interesting conversation about westerns and whether a genre can actually die.

Winnette verifies what I suspected (and said here) about Haint's Stay. Namely that its influences were film and that he didn't/doesn't read much in the genre:

"Haints Stay was more intentionally built from movies than novels or experiences, though I’m pretty sure all the movies I watched were based on books or short stories — something that is notably common in the Western. I was interested in the stage dressing of the Western. But I didn’t let myself read many Westerns, though I wanted to. If they influenced Haints Stay, it was through gauzy layers of interpretation or my own bad memory." -- Colin Winnette

Death of the western

Here's a death of the western theory I haven't heard before:

"The excesses and financial disaster of 1980’s Heaven’s Gate had nearly killed the Western."

Death of the western - random thoughts

The reasons why the western was popular (and is enduring) is many fold (birth of the American Myth for example) and the reasons why the genre died are many. Not the least of which is that it resisted an accurate view of the west, ignored the diversity of the west, and catered to a white, American, male audience (and was filtered through that view point). By the time the revisionist history books of the 1970's came out that showed a more accurate representation of the west and, more perhaps more importantly, the effect of those books were felt in fiction in the 1980's, it was too late for a course correction.

Also, in the 50's and 60's the ideal representative of the explorer moved away from the settler (ie: cowboys) and moved towards the astronaut. The western started to decline, science fiction started to climb. Maybe its a coincidence, maybe not.