The Job of the Wasp: A Novel
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A new arrival at an isolated school for orphaned boys quickly comes to realize there is something wrong with his new home. He hears chilling whispers in the night, his troubled classmates are violent and hostile, and the Headmaster sends cryptic messages, begging his new charge to confess. As the new boy learns to survive on the edges of this impolite society, he starts to unravel a mystery at the school's dark heart. And that's when the corpses start turning up.
A coming-of-age tale, a Gothic ghost story, and a murder mystery all in one, The Job of the Wasp is a bloodcurdling and brilliantly subversive novel about paranoia, love, and the nightmare of adolescence.
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Colin Winnette. (2018). The Job of the Wasp: A Novel. Catapult.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Colin Winnette. 2018. The Job of the Wasp: A Novel. Catapult.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Colin Winnette, The Job of the Wasp: A Novel. Catapult, 2018.
MLA Citation (style guide)Colin Winnette. The Job of the Wasp: A Novel. Catapult, 2018.
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- bioText: Colin Winnette is the author of Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio, 2015), Coyote (Les Figues Press, 2015), Fondly (Atticus Books, 2013) Animal Collection (Spork Press, 2012), and Revelation (Mutable Sound Press, 2011). His books have been translated into French and Italian, and his writing has appeared in Playboy, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Lucky Peach, and numerous other journals and anthologies. He lives in San Francisco.
- name: Colin Winnette
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- "A witty and grisly gothic unlike anything I’ve ever read. You should absolutely read this." —Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble
A new arrival at an isolated school for orphaned boys quickly comes to realize there is something wrong with his new home. He hears chilling whispers in the night, his troubled classmates are violent and hostile, and the Headmaster sends cryptic messages, begging his new charge to confess. As the new boy learns to survive on the edges of this impolite society, he starts to unravel a mystery at the school's dark heart. And that's when the corpses start turning up.
A coming-of-age tale, a Gothic ghost story, and a murder mystery all in one, The Job of the Wasp is a bloodcurdling and brilliantly subversive novel about paranoia, love, and the nightmare of adolescence. - gradeLevels
- value: Grade 4
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- reviews
- premium: False
- source: Kirkus Reviews
- content: "Winnette portrays his serial killers with an odd grace and punctuates his circular narrative with murders, revenge killings, a shooting spree, and a heroic arc for wannabe gunslinger Bird that is broadly, darkly humorous."
- premium: False
- source: Los Angeles Times
- content: "Winnette's vision is darker, and his knack for tapping into scenes of primal fear and poetic violence serves as an indictment of our species' base nature and worst instincts. Bloodshed begets bloodshed, but Haints Stay lingers on the trauma of the aftermath and explores the unintended consequences of violence."
- premium: False
- source: Publisher's Weekly
- content: "[Winnette] accentuates the grimness of this portrait of the frontier as a place where desperation and death were always near at hand."
- premium: False
- source: Electric Literature
- content: "Dreamlike in its tone from the outset, Haints Stay becomes even more so as it reaches its conclusion: hidden identities are revealed; a sense of surrender pervades the novel as notions of identity slip away and blur. And the book's final sentence shifts things from the Western realm to an even deeper strain of American literature, magnifying the subversion even more as it nods in the direction of an iconic final sentence."
- premium: False
- source: Lit Reactor
- content: "One of the most wonderful things about Haints Stay is its black sense of humor. It's subtle, dry, and slightly perverse, but it's definitely there. It keeps the otherwise brutal reality of the character's lives in check, because if there's one thing the reader learns about Brooke and Sugar quite early on in the book, it's this: don't piss them off. These are men who are willing to slice guts and throats to avenge stolen blankets."
- premium: False
- source: The Portland Mercury
- content: "The cinematic quality to this work is undeniable and there's a coolness that reminds me of Cormac McCarthy--but I like this more than McCarthy."
- premium: False
- source: The Collagist
- content: [Haints Stay] "is an intense, bloody, touching, and unexpectedly funny narrative that's part road novel, part weird Western, and part coming of age/coming of gender story."
- premium: False
- source: Full Stop
- content: "Haints Stay is dark, and bloody, and violent: raw and cutthroat and still capable of reducing you to helpless snickers."
- premium: False
- source: Publishers Weekly (starred review)
- content: "Like a modern-day Poe, [Winnette] has fashioned a narrator whose pull on the reader's sympathy gradually fades as she recounts the aftermath of her daughter's mysterious disappearance?.Winnette's deeply affecting story is hard to put down and even harder to forget."
- premium: False
- source: Kirkus Reviews
- content: "While there's a contemporary urgency to Winnette's novel, it's the small details (and how they're revealed) that give this story its considerable sting."
- premium: False
- source: Electric Literature
- content: "Winnette's work has the timeless quality of myth?--?nameless characters whose stories feel more like refractions of something eternal than concrete events being narrated. The book is over in a heartbeat?--?all the better to reread it and spend some time burrowing into some of the exquisitely crafted sentences."
- premium: False
- source: Steve Himmer, Necessary Fiction
- content: "Winnette writes in that sort of effortless-yet-insightful style that makes other writers want to rewrite everything they've ever written; this together with his willingness to plumb the darkest depths of human emotion, for lack of a better word, stuns."
- premium: False
- source: Foreword Reviews
- content: "Although it's a slim book, Coyote is a perfect example of less being more. Winnette has created an experience in which the reader is led through the labyrinth of a disturbed woman's mind, unforgettably."
- premium: False
- source: Ploughshares
- content: "Sharp and delicate, this story is as fragmented as the narrator's shattered frame of mind, all the more satisfying for its uncertainties."
- premium: False
- source: Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, and Willful Creatures
- content: "Coyote has a strong and inviting voice and that voice wraps around a dark story, a contemporary story, and one that has its own velocity and fragmentation built in. I found myself swept along in it and impacted by its delicate/bleak movement."
- premium: False
- source: Washington Independant Review of Books
- content: "This spare, nerve-rattling tale -- which has nothing to do with wild dogs -- lingers long after it's put down."
- premium: False
- source: Heavy Feather Review
- content: "Subtly vicious and slowly heartbreaking, Coyote by Colin Winnette is a splinter that strikes a major nerve making your whole body tremble."
- premium: False
- source: Heather Lang, The Literary Review
- content: "Once again, I'm left with more questions than answers. Or, maybe, I do have the answers--answers that I just don't...
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- content:
October 23, 2017
Winnette’s sinister novel (after Haints Stay) begins with a Dickensian premise, as the narrator (unnamed for most of the book) is enrolled in a draconian school for orphans which, its headmaster brags, is “not a school.... It is a temporary holding facility with mandatory education elements.” Things quickly take a change for the weird when the headmaster singles out the narrator for special treatment, after which his rivals and bullies among the student body begin turning up dead. As corpses pile up, the narrator falls under suspicion, a possibility he refuses to discount even as he tries to solve the mystery. His ensuing investigation results in a death by wasp’s nest, runs afoul of a pair of sadistic twins, and begins to suggest that the school is not what it seems, but some kind of “purgatory of adolescence.” But who is the killer? Though the novel is tricked out with too many reversals, obfuscations, surreal characters, and seemingly random twists, it’s commendable for its experimentation: its oddness evokes Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten and Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz. This is a worthwhile novel for readers of the dark and twisted, who will find both in spades.
- premium: True
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- content:
November 1, 2017
A psychological ghost story featuring foul deeds, grizzly deaths, and the horrific nature of the human mind.Winnette (Haints Stay, 2015, etc.) has throughout his career demonstrated an affinity for toying with the conventions of genre; here, in his sixth book, he takes on the realm of the gothic. An unnamed narrator has just lost his parents and is sent away to a state-run facility for orphaned boys. A natural outcast, he finds his new home isolating, his fellow students cruel, and the headmaster vicious and creepy. Once the corpses begin to appear, however, it becomes clear there's something far scarier afoot than the trials and tribulations of fitting in. Winnette's ghastly vision, which would be right at home in the minds of Guillermo Del Toro or Shirley Jackson, is disturbing from beginning to end. The narrator's voice contains an emotionless chill that gradually gets under the reader's skin like the endless ticking of a clock, and his profoundly intellectual consciousness, while at times too long-winded, energizes the novel's somewhat generic plot without ever betraying its eerily placid tone.Winnette has conjured a profoundly unsettling story from the murky depths of his imagination; once it clicks, giggles, and slithers into your mind, it's nearly impossible to dislodge.COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from December 1, 2017
Writing as if in reaction to the glut of rapid-paced thrillers that read more like screenplays or plot points with dialog, Winnette (Haints Stay) exhibits a triumph of patience--exceedingly rare in young authors--and a gothic introspection that is a welcome antidote. That the novel spans but some 208 pages seems to belie even the possibility of the Henry James-like style with which its credited, but that observations is accurate. Not only does the author take considerable license with the classic unreliable narrator, he invests nearly the entire cast of roughly 30 orphaned boys and their headmaster with that quality, which makes for an odd effect: relentless tension throughout a story of moderate pace. Are there hostile ghosts menacing the facility? Is our young protagonist, who arrives at the orphanage a sociopath, obsessed with sex or merely a healthy lad in control of his emotions? These questions cannot be answered by way of accepted tropes, and readers will marvel at how little is known of human psychology. VERDICT This deeply haunting mix of literary aesthetics, murder mystery, and the dark intensity of contemporary thriller will be savored by fans of Jac Jemc's The Grip of It, Donna Tartt's The Secret History, Marisha Pessl's Night Film, and Peter Straub's Shadowlands.--William Grabowski, McMechen, WV
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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