The most unsettling English novel of the 1960s brought back to print after over 50 years"The most frightening novel of the year."--The ScotsmanTodd, Randy, and Carter have grown up together. They have the same interests as other teenage boys: girls, cars, money, future careers. But when they decide to kidnap a young boy and hold him captive in an abandoned quarry outside their town, they release more primitive instincts of violence and control. In QUARRY, Jane White creates a situation both fantastic and realistic. Her story works as a convincing account of a crime and as powerful piece of symbolism that raises disturbing questions about the latent capacity for evil that hides within apparently normal, unexceptional people.In Lord of the Flies, William Golding needed a plane crash and a desert island to bring out the capacity for violence and evil in his English schoolboys. Jane White, a mother and housewife living in Godalming when she wrote QUARRY, needed only a chance encounter in fields not unlike those around her own development.QUARRY is deeply unsettling. White's teenaged kidnappers ride bikes, worry about exams, have to be home in time for supper. Yet they also imprison and torture another boy with the cold calculating objectivity that Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil."Written in cool, realistic prose, QUARRY pulls the reader into a vortex of violence and inhumanity. It's a gripping and believable account of a crime and a parable filled with complex symbolism."Nothing since A High Wind in Jamaica probes the depths of innocence with such terror and finesse as Jane White's novel," declared Newsday.Fiction.