His flower-child mother deserted Frank at birth, then briefly returned when he was three-and may have helped to cause little Frank's life-shattering accident.
His father, an ex-hippie and sometime chemist, is a shambling eccentric obsessed with measurement. Is there good reason for Frank to be so blithely unhinged, so devoted to his warfare against wildlife and his ritual killings? ("How the hell am I supposed to get heads and bodies for the Poles and the Bunker if I don't kill things?") There is indeed. The narrator, whose cool prose is sometimes a bit too sophisticated for credibility, is 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, living outside a remote Scottish village-a cheerfully insane lad who tortures animals, imagines that he gets instructions from the "Factory" (the room upstairs where he cremates wasps), and fondly recalls the three grisly/farcical murders he committed from age six to age ten. Through much of this impressive first novel, almost up until the awkward and misguided finale, young Scottish writer Banks achieves that fine British balance-between horrific content on the one hand and matter-of-fact comic delivery on the other.
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