Recently, i ran out of Iain
M. Banks, and into an offline vacation.
So, despite a promise i gave to myself never to read Banks' non-scifi stuff (based upon hearing that his scifi stuff was abridged, and non-scifi Banks was severely brutal), i found and picked the first book by the author i could find on the library shelf: called A Song of Stone. By then i've had read most of Wasp Factory, and it didn't seem that nasty.
It was everything i feared to find in unabridged, non-scifi Banks. Very quickly it became so dark that it was hard to read. And then it became easier to read, because with each page i nurtured a hope that it would become less dark - because, surely, there couldn't be more waiting.
Of course, there was. It only got darker, mounting an additional layer of perversion and atrocity with each chapter.
In the end, it was pretty rewarding, though.
I think i actually liked it, if at least for being a literary adventure; something i didn't expect.
