Review: "The Job of the Wasp" by Colin Winnette

When I look back on it now, my experience reading Iain Reid’s game changing debut novel I Thinking of Ending Things might not have been a good idea. I still like it and with its mixture of horror and sadness give it a timeless quality. But the more books I read in the “literary” horror genre, I view Reid’s novel as an anomaly and less as a sign of things to come. That is sadly the case with Colin Winnette’s fifth book and third novel (don’t quote me on that) The Job of the Wasp. It styles itself a horror novel and has some familiar trappings regularly associated with the genre: a creepy location, characters with murky motivations and an unreliable narrator that ends up being a lot more than just the person telling the story. But besides those surface level attributes, this is, at times a painfully boring book, with large sections of its slim 191 page length being painful in their density. It begins with our unnamed narrator being shipped off to a remote boarding school for orphans. He is fat and it is hard for him to fit in, especially since the school year is already in swing. He is confronted by a few creepy encounters with students and the Headmaster, whose interrogation is both equally comforting and nefarious as his intentions are nebulous. It is only when a body is found in the garden and another student dies do the school’s true nature reveal itself. I couldn’t stop thinking about Jac Jemc’s novel The Grip of It while reading this: both are genre books that try to scare you, but instead make a few too many attempts to be clever and never really rise above tired tropes to give us something new. Despite that, this book is filled with a startling number of creepy scenes, from one taking place in a gazebo, another in the mess hall where a seemingly dead character returns and becomes the book’s true villain, and finally the one at the end, which is annoyingly confusing but still managed to creep me out. This is a very impressive book to look at even though it’s not nearly as substantive as it may think it is.

Rating: 4/5