Originally published in Verbicide issue #23

Active Bladder, 184 pages, trade paperback, $10.00

Vespa is smart and short parasitic thriller about giant killer wasps, anonymously thriving in a state fish and wildlife park. Author Dean Lombardo tells a grand story in this cerebral read, beginning in etymology and ending in horror.

Two Fish and Wildlife agents have vanished in Weston, Connecticut, and the state has contracted Dr. Tom Goodman — a Professor of Etymology with a shadowy past in bug research — with a secret research proposal to find out exactly what is thieving a growing list of missing persons and livestock. What they find are oversized, carnivorous wasps — as small as a meter and as large as a medium-sized child — using animals and children as living, unconscious egg incubators.

Each wasp egg yields a white, spiraled, six-inch larva: blindly swaying “cobras” that spit out an inky black liquid with a mace-like hypnotic anesthesia. The larvae grow into black, eyeless, giant grubs as they hatch out of the eggs buried within the flesh of their hosts. As they grow, they morph into giant wasps serving as workers, soldiers, and at least one queen in a colony possessing a mysterious, collective intelligence.

The larvae and grubs roam between a murky area known as Devil’s Den and the backyards of several affluent families bordering the entrance to a murky, slippery delta inside a federal nature reserve while seeking a growing number of small live mammals to serve as underground incubators.

Vespa’s underlying themes are dual in nature; though a horror/sci-fi tale on the surface, Lombardo puts the human race under a literary microscope as we read of wasps all possessing equally intricate roles, mirroring the philosophy of eugenics that defined the 19th and early 20th century period of Anglican and Western Europe. This concise thriller, juxtaposing the research of agricultural farms being tended by parasites employing Nazi methods, is an engaging “x-file” of epic proportions.