CANR
WORK TITLE: USERS
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://colinwinnette.net/
CITY: San Francisco
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CA 378
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Denton, TX.
EDUCATION:School of the Art Institute of Chicago, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor. Pank magazine, associate editor.
AWARDS:Winner of Sonora Review’s 2012 Short Short Fiction Contest, and Heavy Feather Review’s Featured Chapbook Contest, both for Follow Through; winner of NOS Book Contest, Les Figues Press, for Coyote.
WRITINGS
Author of chapbook Follow Through. Contributor of poetry, short stories, and essays to journals and periodicals, including Gulf Coast, Believer, Hobart, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Washington Square Review, and Sonora Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Colin Winnette’s novels often depict characters dealing with harrowing situations. The prize-winning Coyote, for instance, is about the consequences of a child’s disappearance, while Haints Stay depicts two brothers working as hired killers in the Old West. By contrast, The Job of the Wasp centers on an unnamed child narrator who is suspected by others to be a killer. “Much of Winnette’s work has the timeless quality of myth,” Connor Ferguson observed in a review of Coyote for the online journal Electric Literature. Each of Winnette’s novels, Ferguson added, is “a concentrated flashbang of precise writing.”
Coyote
This novel is narrated by a mother whose daughter has vanished, without a trace and without a clue. The woman and her husband have tried a variety of means to find the girl, but neither their appearances on television nor the work of a dedicated detective has yielded any results. With the investigation at a standstill, the couple tries to accept the situation, but it emerges that their marriage is deeply troubled. The narrator, who is never given a name, refers to her husband only by his relationship to the child—he is always “her dad.” There are incidents of violence between the couple and involving others; the book takes its title from the wife’s memory of her husband killing a coyote. Eventually, it appears that the woman is losing her sanity.
Several reviewers found this a riveting story, with Winnette delivering what some saw as a highly original treatment of a familiar premise. “ Coyote selects a handful of clichés from the rural imaginary—missing children, trashy talk shows, crime procedural, domestic violence, etc.—and overcooks them in the deranged mind of its protagonist,” remarked Jonathon Sturgeon, writing on the Web site Flavorwire. “This is a good thing.” The novel, observed blogger Ken Wohlrob at Small Press Book Review, “is not stock mystery or suspense. All tropes are thrown out the window.” Similarly, Andre Gray, a contributor to the electronic journal Neon Tommy, noted that the book “takes all the stuff stereotypical in crime fiction and flips it on its head” and offers “a compelling, unexpected narrative that openly judges a heavily commercialized, often-tired genre.” At the Heavy Feather Review Web site, Nick Sweeney added: “Winnette touches the surface of expectation and then heads into darker depths. … In some ways, each passage is its own labyrinth and the reader must attempt to figure a way out, and if their guide is leading them towards the dim light or into farther darkness.” Additional praise came from a Kirkus Reviews critic, who reported: “While there’s a contemporary urgency to Winnette’s novel, it’s the small details (and how they are revealed) that give this story its considerable sting.” A Publishers Weekly commentator concluded: “Winnette’s deeply affecting story is hard to put down and even harder to forget.”
Haints Stay
Haints Stay —“haint” is a southern colloquialism for “ghost” or “lost soul”—tells the story of a pair who might well be considered lost souls. Brooke and Sugar are brothers who work as contract killers in the western United States in frontier times. One of their recent employers has decided to kill them rather than pay them, so they are on the run from him. Along the way they are joined by an amnesiac teenage boy, whom they call Bird, who seems to have gone through a traumatic experience. Their world is one of casual violence, and the novel contains incidents of mass murder and even cannibalism. Brooke and Sugar are survivors of an abusive childhood, and it is eventually revealed that Sugar is actually biologically female, although she identifies and lives as a man, and she is pregnant with Brooke’s child.
Some reviewers noted that Winnette subverts the conventions of the western genre with Haints Stay, and he has said that was his intention. “The idea of writing a Western was really appealing to me because it gave me all of these little devices and tools and expectations to play with, stark conceptions of justice and belonging being a couple of them,” he told Alex Norcia in an interview for the Web-based magazine Offing. He continued: “I don’t think I was interested in honoring the notion of the Western all that much. I was interested in taking what I love about them and using that and poking some holes in the things I think are ridiculous or just funny.”
Winnette’s approach found favor with several critics. “In his astonishing portrait of American violence, Haints Stay, Colin Winnette makes use of the Western genre to stunning effect,” related Jim Ruland in a review for a Los Angeles Times blog. Leah Dearborn, writing on the Web site Lit Reactor, commented positively on the book’s “rich characters” and “black sense of humor.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor thought the novel “falls somewhat uncomfortably between Deadwood and The Crying Game,” but noted that “Winnette portrays his serial killers with an odd grace.” Ruland summed up the work with unqualified praise, saying: “While the novel flouts most of the conventions of the traditional horse opera, the rewards of Haints Stay, belong to the reader.”
The Job of the Wasp
(open new)With The Job of the Wasp, a child narrator is bullied by his fellow orphans at a disciplinarian school. When the sadistic headmaster starts giving the narrator special privileges, some of his bullies begin to be found dead. The others suspect the narrator has something to do with the deaths and distance themselves from him. He doesn’t outright reject their accusations, but he does help to try and find out who is responsible for the killings. Even during his investigation, though, more bodies are found. The narrator suggests there is something wrong about the school itself, but his classmates don’t believe him.
Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Michael Berry claimed that the novel “is its own unique, surreal thing, related in a distinctive voice, by turns funny and spooky, even if its ultimate meaning remains elusive.” Berry also called the narrator’s unreliableness “creepy fun.” In a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael Valinsky commented that “the poetics of witnessing give the text a voyeuristic look, like readers are watching the story unfold from the outside looking into an isolated, atemporal, eerie space.” Valinsky concluded that “it’s the unheimlich, the uncanny nature of Winnette’s story that makes each narrative occurrence visceral and creepily familiar. Against all odds, we end up believing the child, and we might be the only ones.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly insisted that “this is a worthwhile novel for readers of the dark and twisted, who will find both in spades.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor emphasized that “Winnette has conjured a profoundly unsettling story from the murky depths of his imagination” that is “nearly impossible to dislodge.”
Users
In the novel Users, Miles works for a virtual reality company that has been receiving death threats. He puts long hours into his pet project of creating an experience that he calls “The Ghost Lover,” even manipulating his coworkers so they will drop their projects and help him with his. Miles and coworker Lily have one of their expanded virtual reality devices, known as the Egg, approved by the company. Using it, Miles becomes more alienated from his life and fixated on a recurring image that he sees that begins to haunt him.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly described the author’s look into technology as being “vertiginous.” The same reviewer, however, thought that the final section of the book was “rushed.” Nevertheless, the Publishers Weekly contributor lauded that “in Winnette’s hands, the dangerous blur between the virtual and reality provides both a warning and a thrill.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the novel “a disquieting cautionary tale for an age of virtual spaces.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2014, review of Coyote; April 1, 2015, review of Haints Stay; November 1, 2017, review of The Job of the Wasp; January 1, 2023, review of Users.
Los Angeles Times, June 19, 2015, Jim Ruland, “In Haints Stay, an Edgy Indie Publisher Takes on the Bloody Old West.”
Publishers Weekly, November 24, 2014, review of Coyote, p. 49; April 6, 2015, review of Haints Stay, p. 35; October 23, 2017, review of The Job of the Wasp, p. 61; October 17, 2022, review of Users, p. 36.
San Francisco Chronicle, https://www.sfgate.com/ (January 8, 2018), Michael Berry, review of The Job of the Wasp.
ONLINE
Atticus Books website, http://atticusbooksonline.com/ (July 22, 2015), author profile.
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (July 22, 2015), Brian Nicholson, review of Coyote.
Colin Winnette website, http://colinwinnette.net (January 27, 2023).
Electric Literature, http://electricliterature.com/ (January 5, 2015), Connor Ferguson, review of Coyote.
Flavorwire, http://flavorwire.com/ (January 22, 2015), Jonathon Sturgeon, “Dread Country: Colin Winnette’s Coyote.”
Heavy Feather Review, http://heavyfeatherreview.com/ (February 17, 2015), Nick Sweeney, review of Coyote.
Hoodline, http://hoodline.com/ (June 2, 2015), Amy Stephenson, “Tomorrow at Booksmith: Colin Winnette Comes Home for Book Launch.”
Lit Reactor, https://litreactor.com/ (June 3, 2015), Leah Dearborn, review of Haints Stay.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (January 27, 2018), Michael Valinsky, review of The Job of the Wasp.
Neon Tommy, http://www.neontommy.com/ (November 10, 2014), Andre Gray, review of Coyote.
Offing, http://theoffingmag.tumblr.com/ (May 25, 2015), Alex Norcia, author interview.
Ploughshares, http://blog.pshares.org/ (February 6, 2015), Amelia Hassani, review of Coyote.
Poets & Writers website, http://www.pw.org/ (July 22, 2015), author profile.
Small Press Book Review, http://thesmallpressbookreview.blogspot.com/ (July 22, 2015), Ken Wohlrob, review of Coyote.
Colin Winnette is a writer from Denton, Texas.
His latest novel Users is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in February 2023.
He is also the author of Revelation, Animal Collection, Fondly, Coyote, Haints Stay, and The Job of the Wasp, an American Bookseller Association’s Indie Next Pick. His novels have been translated into Italian and French.
He was the winner of Les Figues Press's NOS Book Contest, a runner-up for Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Award, and a finalist for Gulf Coast Magazine’s Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose.
His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Playboy, McSweeney’s, The Believer, BuzzFeed Books, and more.
He's represented by Kevin O’Connor.
Colin Winnette
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Colin Winnette
Winnette at the 2015 Texas Book Festival
Winnette at the 2015 Texas Book Festival
Born 12/1984
Occupation Author
Nationality American
Website
colinwinnette.net
Colin Winnette is an American novelist,[1] short story writer, and poet. In 2019 he was is the author of six works of fiction.
Contents
1 Early life and education
2 Career
3 References
4 External links
Early life and education
Winnette grew up in Denton, Texas. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he earned an MFA in writing in 2012.[2]
Career
Winnette's first novel, Revelation, was published in 2011 by Mutable Sound Press while he was a graduate student. He has written five more works of fiction: Animal Collection (Spork Press 2012), Fondly (Atticus Books 2013), Coyote (Les Figues Press 2015),[3][4] Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio 2015), and ‘’The Job of the Wasp ‘’ (Soft Skull 2018).
Winnette's short stories, poetry, reviews and other compositions have appeared in various publications, including McSweeney's, The American Reader, The Believer, Gulf Coast Magazine, and 9th Letter. He was the winner of Les Figues Press's 2013 NOS Book Contest, for his novel Coyote. He also won the 2012 Sonora Review's Short Short Fiction Award and Heavy Feather Review's Featured Chapbook Contest, and he was a finalist for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's First Book Award and Gulf Coast Magazine's Donald Barthelme Prize.[5][6]
His novels have been translated into Italian and French.
Winnette, Colin USERS Soft Skull Press (Fiction None) $27.00 2, 21 ISBN: 9781593767372
The inventor of a cutting-edge VR project descends into a state of profound alienation.
Winnette's recent novels have ventured into the realm of surreal Westerns (Haints Stay, 2015) and unsettling ghost stories (The Job of the Wasp, 2018). With this new novel, he's opted for a different route, following the life of Miles, a man working for a virtual reality company who has been receiving death threats. There are clues early on that Miles is not the greatest of co-workers--an early passage describes him manipulating his colleague Lily's schedule so she's working on his brainchild, an "experience" called The Ghost Lover, instead of her own ambitious project. His penchant for working late hours is but one manifestation of his profound alienation from life, which Winnette also evokes by barely using the proper names of Miles' wife and children. Winnette links this anomie to larger questions of technology and corporatization; later on, Winnette shares details of Miles' previous job, when he'd worked on an acclaimed television series that gradually compromised its aesthetic until it lost its audience. In the novel's second half, the VR company Miles and Lily work for has embraced an idea that the two of them proposed--an expanded virtual reality presence that utilizes a device called the Egg. Gradually, Miles' waking life, dreams, and VR experiences begin to blur together--eventually arriving at a shocking image that both reframes Miles' alienation and sets him spiraling even further. The sense of menace that Winnette establishes early on with the death threats continues to evolve over the course of the novel--eventually arriving at a haunted, haunting place.
A disquieting cautionary tale for an age of virtual spaces.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Source Citation
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"Winnette, Colin: USERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A731562285/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=dfbf49ac. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023.
Users
Colin Winnette. Soft Skull, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-1-59376-737-2
Winnette (The Job of the Wasp) delivers an engaging story of a virtual reality designer stuck in a rut. Miles's career founders as he casts about for a new product for his Chicago startup that rivals his signature augmented reality experience, "The Ghost Lover," where virtual reality players are haunted by an ephemeral lover personalized to their own experience. Meanwhile, his home life presents its own challenges; his marriage is struggling, and his 10-year-old daughter plays increasingly violent games with her younger sister. Perhaps most troubling, Miles acquires a "ghost lover" of his own, and he's receiving cryptic, anonymous death threats. The author convincingly portrays Miles's claustrophobic interior, where the protagonist is held captive by virtual simulacra. After a vacation with his family rekindles Miles's creativity, he plunges full speed into the creation of the "Egg," a virtual-reality pod that encases the user's body. Though a commercial and professional success, the Egg accelerates the dissolution of Miles's family, and brings him ever closer to the source of his elusive threats. Despite a rushed final act, the author offers a vertiginous glimpse down a tech rabbit hole. In Winnette's hands, the dangerous blur between the virtual and reality provides both a warning and a thrill. Agent: Kevin O'Connor, O'Connor Literary Agency. (Feb.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Users." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 43, 17 Oct. 2022, p. 36. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A724346049/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7ac0d237. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023.
Winnette, Colin THE JOB OF THE WASP Soft Skull Press (Adult Fiction) $16.95 1, 9 ISBN: 978-1-59376-680-1
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: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
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"Winnette, Colin: THE JOB OF THE WASP." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A512028564/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=850dad2c. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023.
The Job of the Wasp
Colin Winnette. Soft Skull (PGW, dist), $16.95
trade paper (208p) ISBN 978-1-59376-680-1
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 Walsers Jakob von G unten and Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz. This is a worthwhile novel for readers of the dark and twisted, who will find both in spades. (Jan.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
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"The Job of the Wasp." Publishers Weekly, vol. 264, no. 43, 23 Oct. 2017, p. 61. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A512184157/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e7d1418f. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023.
The Language of Bees: On Colin Winnette’s “The Job of the Wasp”
January 27, 2018 • By Michael Valinsky
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The Job of the Wasp
COLIN WINNETTE
AFTER THE TRAGIC LOSS of his parents, an unnamed child, who doubles as the narrator of the story, arrives at an orphanage that will forever alter his perception of reality, community, and, most importantly, himself. In his sixth novel, Colin Winnette follows the curious adventures of a child who neither knows the world he lives in nor how to navigate the challenges that will help him determine the answers to his questions. Oscillating between murder mystery, psychological thriller, and coming-of-age novel, The Job of the Wasp (Soft Skull Press, 2018) is a careful, yet playful, study of the power plays inevitable among children, and between children and adults, by way of an exploration of group dynamics and science fiction. Winnette’s work capitalizes on the spectral aspect of being alive to discover a newfound meaning for self-actualization. “The game had fallen habitually into place, as a matter of course, and I wasn’t yet part of their world.”
When the narrator arrives at the orphanage, he is greeted by a cryptic Headmaster who, very early on in their encounter, makes the child understand that he is not privileged, that he does not deserve the best quality of life, and that he must work hard to get ahead. Naturally, this is the kind of language one would expect to hear from a headmaster; by virtue of his position, he must create a redoubtable system of fear to impose his authority over his student body. But upon entering the orphanage, the first encounter and conversation the child has with the Headmaster sets the unfriendly tone that will fester in and riddle the novel. So begins the child’s experience with the group: “I thought about this and realized that at that point in my life I was loyal to no one and felt pride for nothing. It was something I hoped to change.”
The child often has lucid moments like the above, where he is able to look at his situation and provide a sharp analysis of cause and effect. When the child expresses his lack of loyalty, and, as a result, his unflinching independence, it’s clear that he is in the process of creating a protective wall around himself. He stabilizes himself in his beliefs in order to avoid the hardship of having to fit in. However, his self-assurance quickly plummets when Fry — one of his peers — decides to tease him in class. Poking the back of the child’s ear with the end of a blade, Fry causes a scene in the classroom, ultimately leading the child to the Headmaster’s office. Shortly after, Fry disappears.
“Rat!” and “Snitch!” are only a couple of the names the boys call our unnamed child upon realizing Fry’s disappearance. From there, everything unravels into complete chaos. Unclear why Fry has suddenly left the premises, the child is forced to endure constant bullying and must fight to be believed. At this point in the story, the child has lost credibility, and no one seems to want to have anything to do with him. In response to this second level of ostracism, the child’s language changes quite dramatically: “I ground my nails into my palms, watching their faces and looking for signs of guilt. Who was watching me? Who was not watching me? I looked for anything at all, keeping to myself and trying to go unnoticed, until I was pushed from behind and fell face-first into the water.”
If he started out self-confident enough to proclaim allegiance or loyalty to no one, the child has now fallen deep into the trope of acceptance. Winnette effectively paints the picture of the preteen experience: an endless stream of attempts to fit into a group that innately wants to reject you and arbitrarily demean you. Interestingly, Winnette combines this trope with some critical theory. If the child is suddenly a threat to the others, and if no one believes a word he says or wants anything to do with him, then what does it mean for him to be the sole narrator of the story? The book exclusively follows the child’s experience and perspective in strict first-person perspective. Never does it veer into the minds of other characters, thus making the narrative one-sided. And the child is at risk of losing credibility not only in the eyes of his fellow orphans, but also in those of his readers. With this in mind, the child’s statements take on a different dimension: “Was there any potential use to the suffering I’d endured, or was there nothing left for me to do but reluctantly live out the final stages of a nefarious plot crafted by a homicidal despot who’d outsmarted me?”
The anger the child feels toward an unanswering despotic author is exacerbated when an unexpected body surfaces and another one drops dead. Death almost immediately invades the text, like fog projected from a machine, surreptitiously and calculated, with no escape on the horizon. Desperately trying to alert the others of the imminent threat, the child tries everything in his power to connect with someone, but to no avail. Only fellow orphan Nick will listen and ultimately tell him about the Ghost that haunts the orphanage: every year five individuals die, no less, no more.
The apparition of the Ghost causes complete mayhem within the orphanage, though the mayhem is solely mediated through the eyes of the child, who, as it’s been made clear, is not welcome among the others. The solitary experience of collective mayhem brings into question the role of the Ghost. Canonically, the Ghost, as we’ve seen in Hamlet, represents the thin line between reality and the imagination. However, which side we are on in The Job of the Wasp is unclear. Winnette successfully blends reality with fiction and, in so doing, forces the readers to question not just the narrator’s authenticity but also the plot’s truth. Is the reality in this novel what it is written as? Put differently, has the despotic author tricked us into believing in a world that does not exist within its own fictional parameters?
“I believe in the importance of staying open to possibilities that exist outside the realm of reason, though it more often than not results in our believing exclusively in what we hope for ourselves. For that reason, I also believe in the need to thoroughly and honestly examine one’s beliefs and the true nature of oneself.”
This uncertainty is doubled by the way in which names function in the book. The children whose names are never pronounced are those that have the most difficulty assimilating to the group. However, those with a defined name occupy significant roles in the community, like Ralph and Jack did in Lord of the Flies. They are the leaders, the apologists, and, ultimately, the ones that the other children will follow. But Winnette has clear intentions in leaving his protagonist unnamed. Without a name, the child can easily move between reality and fiction and perceive situations in a more poetic, ineffable manner. For instance, when destroying a wasp nest, he notes:
There was no home left for them to reach. No place to which they could return. They would have to start fresh or die trying. But at least they had that option. […] Their homes were objects built, not things inherited. We orphans weren’t so lucky. If our nest was knocked down […], where was there left for us to go?
The poetics of witnessing give the text a voyeuristic look, like readers are watching the story unfold from the outside looking into an isolated, atemporal, eerie space: “[F]or a strange moment it did feel like we were alone together on the edge of the world, and that I was somehow both vulnerable and entirely safe,” says the narrator. Winnette’s book is in fact somewhere on the edge of the world, away from what is familiarly human. As the children hang out on this edge, alone, haunted, and threatened, the events that punctuate their lives — however unlikely or long-winded some of them might be — puncture the reader at her core. It’s the unheimlich, the uncanny nature of Winnette’s story that makes each narrative occurrence visceral and creepily familiar. Against all odds, we end up believing the child, and we might be the only ones. “I felt I could see all of humanity in that progression of faces. I wept too, and for all to see.”
‘The Job of the Wasp,’ by Colin Winnette
Michael Berry
Jan. 8, 2018
Colin Winnette
Colin Winnette
Jennifer Yin
Is there an institution more ripe for a touch of the gothic than an all-boys orphanage? 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.
The unnamed narrator of “The Job of the Wasp” arrives at a mysterious institution, hoping to “get a good education, three square meals a day, a place to lay my head.” He is informed by the headmaster that he is not attending a school: “It is a temporary holding facility with mandatory educational elements.”
From there, the narrator’s circumstances grow only stranger. Overweight, not socially savvy but agreeable to following the whims of authority, the boy becomes a target for a bully, who eventually goes missing. Worse still, the narrator unearths a corpse while performing gardening duty and accidentally kills his workmate.
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The San Francisco author of “Revelation” and “Haints Stay,” Winnette saturates “The Job of the Wasp” with odd incidents designed to keep readers perpetually off balance. Whose voices does the protagonist hear outside his bedroom window? What is the meaning of the headmaster’s cryptic notes? Is the facility really haunted and, if so, which tenants might be the ghosts?
The narrator proves to be anything but reliable, and that’s the creepy fun of “The Job of the Wasp” — the gap between what the boy witnesses and what he understands. The novel will remind some readers of the films of Guillermo del Toro, others of “The Sixth Sense” or “Lord of the Flies.”
Despite its many influences, Winnette’s book, however, is its own unique, surreal thing, related in a distinctive voice, by turns funny and spooky, even if its ultimate meaning remains elusive.
Michael Berry writes the science fiction and fantasy column for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: books@sfchronicle.com
The Job of the Wasp
By Colin Winnette