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February 26, 2025

2025 Reading Challenge 08 The Wasp Factory

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A writer who is still close to my heart, Iain Banks with or without the M left us on 9 June 2013. A massive gap in British literature and a small one in my life.

The Wasp Factory which I picked out to reread this week, was voted one of the top 50 books that helped shape and inspire teenage lives the most as part of a World Book Day poll. It certainly impacted me; shocking, funny, scary, sad and above all cut through with Bank’s rogueish charm and easy-going writing style.

a black cover symbols of dying wasps and other esoterica, it's Iain Bank's the wasp factory
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, 1984

It’s Sunday and I have already finished the book, the most hated word in the English language unputdownable proved apt. I read it through early mornings and late nights entering an immersive virtual world that only the best books enable.

I wondered if I’d find it a disappointment. Would adult me scoff at what teen me had found so compelling? As it turns out it pushed many of the buttons the second time around, this is a book that has stood the test of time, it is of the highest quality. I love reading some of the reviews and newspaper comments of the time; ‘silly’, ‘mediocre’, ‘ghoulish’, ‘sick’, ‘sadistic’, ‘nasty’, ‘a bad dream of a book’. All they did was push the sales higher and bring it to my attention!

This Reading Challenge is proving really eye-opening, I’m trying to not make it turn into a chore and so far it hasn’t. It’s definitely got me back into regular reading post-COVID and I’m finding there are knock-on effects, an increasing ability to concentrate, more creative ideas, and more mental energy. Are these things all connected? Maybe.

“If you write a million words of rubbish, you start to realise what you leave out is just as important as what you leave in… The Wasp Factory was the first time I realised that.” ~ Iain Banks

I rated it 8.8 out of 10.

TTRPG Thoughts:

There are SO many aspects of this book, but I’ve picked out The Wasp Factory itself, the twelve sections of the disused clock, each one leading to a different death of the wasp and should then give the user the ability to predict the future. I love this idea, that someone is messing around with these primal almost pagan practices that start to influence the land and the people around them. I can imagine players spending ages deciphering the goings on on the island and trying to link it back to how The Wasp Factory operates. Or is it just a very intricate red herring?

For the last word, let’s leave it to the Irish Times, “A work of unparalleled depravity.” You can imagine what Iain Banks thought of that…

The author Iain Banks laughing away.
Upmarket horror?

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