The Wasp Factory – Banks, Iain

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Enter – if you can bear it – the extraordinary private world of Frank, 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.

‘It was just a stage I was going through.’

1 The Sacrifice Poles

9 What Happened to Eric

l2 What Happened to Me

1 : The Sacrifice Poles

I HAD BEEN making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me.

At the north end of the island, near the tumbled remains of the slip where the handle of the rusty winch still creaks in an easterly wind, I had two Poles on the far face of the last dune. One of the Poles held a rat head with two dragonflies, the other a seagull and two mice. I was just sticking one of the mouse heads back on when the birds went up into the evening air, kaw-calling and screaming, wheeling over the path through the dunes where it went near their nests. I made sure the head was secure, then clambered to the top of the dune to watch with my binoculars.