When I first heard Jason Ockert read from his fiction at the Sewanee Writers Conference years ago, I could not imagine that the friendly-looking young man who shyly coughed into his microphone on stage possessed the kind of wicked imagination that had the power to keep me up at night, book in hand, thumb cuticle caught between my teeth, hand shaking with every page turn, but that is exactly what it felt like to read Ockert’s new novel Wasp Box, published by Panhandler Books this February.

In fact, Ockert’s signature style in both his award-winning story collections, Rabbit Punches and Neighbors of Nothing is a dance between the mundane and the horrific; a rope-walk between the comedic and the tragic. It should be no surprise, therefore, that Wasp Box follows in that tradition …MORE