Colin Winnette – författare

“The Job of the Wasp is a madcap mystery, a macabre coming-of-age story and an unearthly fantasy—but it feels like childhood, like the world, like life.” —Daniel Handler, author of We Are Pirates and All The Dirty Parts

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.

"In his astonishing portrait of American violence, Haints Stay, Colin Winnette makes use of the Western genre to stunning effect. But this isn''t a chummy oater penned by the likes of Zane Grey or Louis L''Amour. Winnette''s frontier feels more Homeric. His knack for tapping into scenes of primal fear and poetic violence serves as an indictment of our species'' base nature and worst instincts. While the novel flouts most of the conventions of the traditional horse opera, the rewards of Haints Stay belong to the reader."—Jim Ruland, Los Angeles Times

"Striking and powerful... a Western as reimagined through the transgressive lens of Dennis Cooper. What Winnette does here is less about undermining the traditions of the Westerns and more about pushing them in unexpected directions."—Tobias Carroll, Electric Literature

"The most anticipated independent novel of the summer."—Flavorwire

"Winnette’s already sharp prose is honed here to a razor edge. It rolls across the stark, lawless world he evokes like approaching thunder."—Midnight Breakfast

Brooke and Sugar are killers. Bird is the boy who mysteriously woke beside them while between towns. For miles, there is only desert and wilderness, and along the fringes, people.

The story follows the middling bounty hunters after they''ve been chased from town, and Bird, each in pursuit of their own sense of belonging and justice. It features gunfights, cannibalism, barroom piano, a transgender birth, a wagon train, a stampede, and the tenuous rise of the West''s first one-armed gunslinger.

Haints Stay is a new acid western in the tradition of Rudolph Wurlitzer, Kelly Reichardt''s Meek''s Cutoff, and Jim Jarmusch''s Dead Man: meaning it is brutal, surreal, and possesses an unsettling humor.