Francis Coldheim built the Aspen Factory in the attic of his house - a device made up of a dial and traps, he launches a wasp there, and it depends on where she crawls, what death she will die. F. consults with the Factory, brings her sacrifices - rats, gulls, dragonflies.
F. is not registered, he does not study anywhere, but he reads books from his father’s library at home. In childhood, a terrible incident happened to him, of which he knows only from his father's stories: a bulldog named Old Sol bit off his genitals and mutilated him forever. The dog after that, of course, was killed, but the boy became angry with the whole world, he begins to take revenge.
Father - a liar and paranoid - constantly puts some experiments in his office, which he constantly keeps locked. wants to get there.
Mother F. - the second wife of her father - Agness K., came only once: to give birth to Paul. After that, she ran away again, crushing her father with her motorcycle, which made him remain lame for life.
F. killed three people: his cousin Blythe for killing his rabbits (put an adder in his prosthetic leg when Blythe was sleeping), his younger brother Paul for being born at the moment when Old Sol disfigured him. decided that the spirit of the SS moved to Paul, and the names are very similar (walking with Paul, I ran into an air bomb and told the child that it was a bell, and that he had to be hit properly so that it rang. He ran away to the side and heard an explosion ), cousin Esmeralda just for balance - 2 children male sex, therefore, it was necessary to kill someone gender too (made a huge snake and launched it together with E.).
Brother F., Eric, went crazy when he studied honey at the university. He saw the worm larvae devour the brains of a child, and he had a seizure. Eric began to set fire to dogs and feed the children with worms. He was placed in a clinic, but he escaped from there. Throughout the book, he hides, calls home to talk with F., rolls tantrums. At the end of the book, he still appears at home and sets fire to the barn, in which his father stores the gunpowder. However, the explosion does not do much harm.
At this time, F. enters his father’s office and finds there tiny male genitalia, which for testing turn out to be made of wax, male hormones and tampons. He furiously rushes to his father and demands that he explain to him what this all means. It turns out that F. is not Francis at all, but Frances, that is, a girl. When he was bitten by the SS, his father saw a great opportunity for an experiment, as well as a way to reduce the female factor in his life. He slipped male hormones into food, so F. had stubble, and there were no critical days.
“Now it turns out that there was nothing to take revenge, there was deception all around ... now it turns out that I was a jester all the way ... each of us in our personal Factory can believe that the corridor has already been chosen and the trap has slammed shut, that we are moving a route to a certain inevitable fate, but just a word, a glance is enough to stumble, and the golden palace turns into a sub-ditch, and the rat labyrinth into a green street. Everyone has one final path, but the route — partly chosen, partly predetermined — is different for everyone and changes in the blink of an eye. I thought my trap slammed shut many years ago, but it turns out that all this time I was only crawling on the dial. And only now the hatch is creaking, only now the real path begins. ”
