The Wasp Factory by Iain BanksMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Imagine you're in a train, in the very last coach, speeding through the countryside when you first feel it - a little tremor, as imagined as felt... then the noise and the shockwave hits, and you're flying forward, down the corridor and through the vestibules, slowly drifting through coach after coach, through scenes of startlement, fear, panic, violence, gradually escalating destruction and gore as you move towards the impact point of the collision...
The story the Wasp Factory builds just like this, feeling almost like a dark version of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, progressing into a cataclysmic horror perfectly set up by, and contrasted with, the idyll and creeping darkness of all that came before.
It's not a Culture novel, so no AI swarms of nanomachine killers as I first thought, but this is a very good break from the long line of depressing medieval fantasy I had got stuck in. And if you seek out horror-drama, you couldn't do too much better than this.
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