Buzzed Books #84 by Drew Barth

Colin Winnette’s The Job of the Wasp

We’re hard in the holiday Season so that means it’s time for ghosts. Slight horror around the holidays seems like a kind of tradition—from A Christmas Carol to Santa Jaws—so I had to maintain the spirit of spirits. This is where The Job of the Wasp by Colin Winnette makes its entrance, and although not exactly a holiday novel itself, it still ticks off those Dickensian boxes of ghosts and orphans. The Job of the Wasp is one of those novels that excels at creating the kind of tension necessary in any good ghost story—we don’t believe in ghosts until the story makes us.

The Job of the Wasp is and isn’t a ghost story at the same time. We’re told that ghosts exist from characters outside our narrator, but that narrator completely rejects the idea at every opportunity. But the ghosts, as they appear, are something more interesting. Ghosts have become, in the orphanage the boys exist in, both tradition and a means of instilling fear. Ghosts offer control and a way of dealing with boys who aren’t necessarily well liked. We can see how Winnette sprinkles the idea of the ghost sparingly throughout the novel: little noises the narrator mentions, seeing faces that aren’t recognizable, a sudden body count. The distinct indecision is what makes the ghosts the most interesting—we can believe the narrator and accept them not being real, or we can get swept up like the rest of the boys.

The air of unreliability is thick throughout The Job of the Waspdue in no small part to our unnamed narrator. His actions, his paranoia, his constant internal monologue that paints pictures of grand schemes and conspiracies is what drives not only the story but the rest of the boys in the orphanage to hate him. And, at times, it’s not hard to see why they hate this unnamed boy.

Over the course of a few months, he fails to learn a single name or face and fails to attempt connections with the people around him. So consumed is the unnamed narrator in his paranoia that he is completely self isolated. And because we are so completely in his head, we get the sense that his unreliability is intentional, that the narrator chooses to see the world in his own way as a means of escaping from it.

Colin Winnette has crafted a deeply fascinating novel that combines some of the best elements of Dickensian character studies and Lord of the Flies-esque peril.

And ghosts.

A story is always great with ghosts. But still. The story is a mystery, a conspiracy, a treatise on never leaving boys to their own devices, and, more than anything, an extraordinary piece of fiction that gives us a slightly altered view of our world.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Buzzed Books #83 by Drew Barth

Rebekah Frumkin’s The Comedown

Ever since reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I get excited when I see a family tree at the beginning of a novel. It’s the possibilities a family tree at the beginning signifies: a multi-generational tale so focused on the minutia of family issues and how those ties break. So I got even happier when I saw two family trees at the beginning of Rebekah Frumkin’s The Comedown. But then the balancing of these two family dramas could prove difficultly delicate—we as readers watch the perilous tightrope act before us and hope for the best. And the best is what happens here. Frumkin is adept at weaving us between both families across generations while always keeping our attention on the story at hand.

While the story is concerned with the Bloom-Mittwoch and Marshall families and how one interaction between them would keep the families intertwined for decades, it is the way the story is told that is the most interesting. When I said balance before, I absolutely meant it. This is a novel told in non-chronological order and jumps from character to character, time period to time period, with only two moments of being in one character’s head twice. There’s a few ways here that a reader can end up lost. But Frumkin is a master at this tightrope balancing—each chapter is like its own story with a piece of the larger story’s arc intertwined. The leanness and precision of the prose only helps to reinforce the masterful work on display for we are given crucial story elements precisely when we need them, never a moment too soon or too late. The Comedown builds its tension and drama like Lego: piece by piece until we see every story thread from every character fully realized in an epilogue that could be the start of its own new story.

What makes Frumkin’s structure work so well is how immediately immersed we are once a new chapter begins. We are taken immediately from one character’s head to another and know nearly right away what kind of new character we’re inside. It’s a testament to how well thought out each charter is going into this novel. Even in a third person POV, the voices are always specific to each character. Fifteen characters make up the core cast of this novel, and not a one has a voice that’s quite like any of the others. We can see the precision of thoughts and actions from one character in the 70s to the meandering, profanity-laden thoughts of a different character thirty years later. And at no point do we ever stop and wonder which character we are, so strong are their mannerisms and voices throughout their chapters.

The Comedownis a great many things: family drama, drug-addled revenge, bildungsroman, social critique. But the story always manages to balance every aspect of itself, never once giving us the stomach tightening feeling that we’re about to watch this delicately beautiful house of cards topple over. The Comedown is a novel of trust as well—for the characters and the reader themselves. While the characters battle through their own ability to trust one another, we as readers are asked to trust Frumkin in her prose. We see the perilous heights the story reaches for with bated breath, but we know that through skill Frumkin will dazzle us as the story glides above. Only then at the last page can we exhale and know we’ve seen something marvelous.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Buzzed Books #73 by Aurora Huiza

Patrick Nathan’s Some Hell

Patrick Nathan’s novel, Some Hell, opens with terrible secrets. Colin, a young boy troubled by his queerness, secretly watches his father hold an unloaded gun to his head and pull the trigger. Colin later sneaks into his father’s empty study, finds the bullets, and loads the gun for reasons he doesn’t understand.

The loading of the gun is akin to the way we stand on rooftops looking down dizzy at the ground below, confused by our impulse to jump off the edge. Colin’s father soon, inevitably, commits suicide with the gun that Colin loaded.

Colin is condemned to live with his dark secret. His dawning queerness is his second dark secret.

These hidden afflictions doom him to a painful adolescence and a confused sexual development. The family descends with Colin into uncertain, ugly hell, which causes it to fragment altogether. The people he loves leave, one by one. Colin ends up alone and under the perpetual “excruciating threat of being half-loved” both by his family, and romantically by other men.

The difficulty with the disintegration of Colin’s family is that we lose characters as readers. Many of the relationships that Nathan sets up in the beginning prove unstable. Colin’s mother sends his autistic brother Paul away to a special home, and his sister Heather runs away with her boyfriend. His best friend Andy turns on him after they have a brief sexual encounter, and we don’t see much of him after that. We lose any possibilities of seeing these relationships, and characters, develop further. As a result, we are stuck in Colin’s head for much of the middle of the book.

Simultaneously, we learn extensively about his mother’s equally uneventful therapy sessions. We often crave more real action and less psychology. Grief pushes people apart, especially when relationships are under pressure, but in the context of a novel, this stasis makes us lose momentum as readers. Depression is not in itself a dramatic conflict.

At the end of the book, Nathan sends Colin and his mother on a road trip, where they have countless dinners together and make jejune observations about life and travel. The introduction of strange divine intervention at the close of the novel is jarring.

Some Hell explores depression, suicide, autism and queerness with commendable bluntness and honesty. Some of the prose that Colin’s deceased father writes in his private notebooks is exceptionally striking. He predicts the family’s descent into hell. He overhears someone say they’ve been through “some hell” in a coffee shop and attempts to define it, musing that “perhaps it was some hell of many hells.”

Colin’s sister similarly predicts the family’s tragedy at the very beginning of the book, telling Colin coldly that he will die soon. “It’ll start to snow when it happens.” Colin’s foretold death is tied to his father’s death, which is a beautiful, terrible notion on Nathan’s part. Nathan creates a sense of foreboding throughout, and a central theme that loving is inherently destructive. He writes that Colin’s mother wants to grab Colin’s father and “tear him apart in her hands, just to bring him closer.”

Some Hell is uneven, but some of Patrick Nathan’s risks are dazzling and memorable, lightning flashes in a world sunk in depression and melancholy.

Aurora Huiza is from Los Angeles, California. She is an undergraduate student at NYU studying English and Creative Writing. She writes fiction and creative nonfiction.