Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English
Weblink
https://www.colinwinnette.net/

THE JOB OF THE WASP

Colin Winnette

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.

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.

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.

Available products
Book Published 2018-01-01 by Catapult

Comments

[The novel is] 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.

Selected as 1 of 101 Books to get excited about in 2018 by BookRiot

Writing as if in reaction to the glut of rapid-paced thrillers that read more like screenplays or plot points with dialogue, Winnette . . . exhibits a triumph of patience-exceedingly rare in young authors-and a gothic introspection that is a welcome antidote . . . 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 Shadowland.

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 . . . 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.

Colin Winnette's short, sharp shock of a novel will convince readers that only the worst can happen among a gloomy collection of administrators, teachers and students. . . . Winnette saturates The Job of the Wasp with odd incidents designed to keep readers perpetually off balance. . . . The narrator proves to be anything but reliable, and that's the creepy fun of The Job of the Wasp. . . . Winnette's book. . . . is its own unique, surreal thing, related in a distinctive voice, by turns funny and spooky."