Why did I love this book?
The idea of an unreliable narrator covers a multiple of sins. They are invariably outliers, dangerously and controversially so. It’s not an easy journey entering their world, but then again, it’s not meant to be. The Wasp Factory was Iain Bank’s debut novel, where dark twisted humour prevails as we follow the unhinged adventures of a deranged Scottish family. Frank, the younger brother, tells the story, where he relies on wasps released into a torture factory of his own making to help divine the future. The book brims with vivid imagery, of burning sheep, and a nightmarish image which continues to stay with me, and I don’t see that ever changing, where someone throws themselves out of a tall building, and by the time they hit the ground they have ripped out all of their teeth.
7 authors picked The Wasp Factory as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The polarizing literary debut by Scottish author Ian Banks, The Wasp Factory is the bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath.
Meet Frank Cauldhame. Just sixteen, and unconventional to say the least:
Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim.
That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again.…