The Wasp Factory

I'd never read a book before which had such spectacular and horrifying opening chapters.

I found the fact that it was describing the cruel acts of a child resonated with me at the time, as everything I'd read before then – which was mainly The Famous Five books, and other books of that ilk, were pretty tame and this book was anything but that. 

This book is a wonderful, fast-paced creep fest! I don’t read a lot of horror, but Frank’s quirkiness caught my attention and held it.

The way he reacts to bad news reveals something about himself. As the trouble comes nearer, the increasingly shocking reveals explain Frank’s quirkiness and make it clear that there’s a true psychopath on the loose. And he’s getting closer! I didn’t want to look away but I couldn’t help gulping now and then.

Very few books have left such a searing image in my mind as Iain Banks did with one particular scene in his disturbing novel, The Wasp Factory.

The story is told first-person through an increasingly unreliable narrator who lets us in on his private rituals, unsettling relationship with his father, and anxieties about his escaped mental patient brother.

This is a novel that takes its time easing you into the narrator’s world, and by the time you reach the climax, the culminating effect of budding dread and pure shock is enough to haunt anyone for a lifetime.

"There just aren’t enough natural deaths. You can’t explain that sort of thing to people, though." Sixteen-year-old Frank lives with his father on a remote Scottish Island. His older brother Eric was institutionalized but he now has escaped and needs Frank’s help. Oh, and Frank kills things. Insects, rodents, small mammals, people. It gets weirder and I was drawn into Banks’ psychological horror story, a twisted, tragic coming-of-age in a sick family, told through the eyes of both a perpetrator and a troubled teen who is a victim of violence. 

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… show more.

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks is a wonderfully macabre first-person account of a budding psychopathic serial killer. The language and matter-of-fact narration subtly twists the reader's mind along the same bloody trails of the protagonist, Frank, an odd teenager with a predilection for animal torture, fire-starting, and sadistic games with anyone he encounters. This novel is very dark, in both humour and psychological horror, and one I consider a classic of modern literary horror.