With the recent passing of Iain Banks and my completion of all of his Culture scifi books, I resolved to go back and read all of his “normal” fiction books. The Wasp Factory was his first novel and while it’s set in the modern world, it’s so far from “normal” that it might as well be science fiction. Our narrator, Frank Cauldhame, is sixteen and tells us early on that he’s already killed three people, but it was “just a phase” he was going through. And things just get odder and more disturbing from there.

FuzzyCo grade: A+