Never Die was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1991. Set in the fictional Texas border town of Nitburg, the novella begins with the murder of Judge Nitburg and his resurrection by Fernando, a Chinese healer. The dead judge is not the only revenant — the dead of the town keep coming back, driven by unfinished business, and the living must coexist with the consequences of every violence the town has ever committed.
The novella was Hannah’s entry into the Western genre — or rather, his demolition of it. The conventions of the Western (the gunfight, the frontier justice, the stoic hero) were subjected to Hannah’s characteristic surrealism and compressed prose.
Collecting Never Die
First edition (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1991): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- Fine in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Very good: $8–$20
Projected values (2026–2036): Modest appreciation.
The Western
Never Die (1991) is Hannah’s only Western — a hallucinatory reworking of the genre in which a dead gunfighter is brought back to life and the conventions of the Western (the showdown, the chase, the frontier town) are subjected to Hannah’s manic distortions. The novel is short, violent, and deliberately absurd, as if Hannah had decided to run the Western through his Mississippi Gothic sensibility and see what emerged.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Hannah’s Civil War obsession? The American Civil War — particularly its Mississippi campaigns — recurs throughout Hannah’s fiction. His characters dream of Confederate cavalry charges, reenact battles, and carry the war’s legacy as a living wound. Hannah saw the Civil War not as history but as an ongoing condition of Southern consciousness.