Hard knocks
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.
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.