If You Liked School, You'll Love Work

Irvine Welsh is known for his chemical romance genre novels and short stories. These narratives are both tragic, comedic, and as strange as any trip taken by an unreconstructed hippie or soccer hooligan. Even if you are not familiar with the drug milieu, the detailed and developed characters will feel all too real. Enjoy anything written by this author and include this work in your library.

I don't understand why there are so many negative reviews here, this is not bad stuff at all, it is typical Irvine Welsh work, not bad at all. If you know what to expect from Welsh, then you should be pleased with the works here. These short stories are pretty fantastic, especially the opener "Rattlesnakes", a Welsh classic. As for the rest, I am partial to "DOGS of Licoln Park, because being from the Chicagoland area, he captures the setting phenominally, especially considering he is from over-seas. Overall, this is not his best work (read "Filth", or "Trainspotting", especially if you are a Welsh virgin), but it deserves more acclaim than the harsh reviews laid out here. His novels are better??? Fact. But for 9/10 authors most reviewers will say the same thing. For some reason people just don't gravitate towards the short story anymore, and thats a shame. Give it a try.

If you are 25 pages into a book and the protagonist has his "wee felly doonstairs" bitten by a rattlesnake in the middle of the desert so that his friend has to suck out the poison under the watchful eyes of two Mexican criminals who accidentally hit upon the charming panorama..., odds are that you are reading Irvine Welsh. Yet the first story is not actually a good way to introduce this book. It is the only example of the sickness-for-sickness-sake that has plagued many of Welsh's recent efforts. But fortunately, the other four stories to varying degrees see Welsh back in old form. When he takes the time to endow his characters with emotional and psychological depth, we know that Welsh is the master of creating the most politically incorrect, hilariously funny, pathetic, deeply tragic and yet perfectly real-world people that you just can't stop reading about. And as always, much of the beauty and the fun lies in the casual unfolding of events that will outrun the imagination of even an experienced Welsh reader. My rating for the bundle is necessarily an average, but Welsh lovers cannot miss this one. Especially the last story (that covers almost half the book) ranks with his best work, ya hoor, sor!

After a couple of misfires, Irvine Welsh once again goes on the attack at human frailty. The first story is a sad but hilarious look at a trio of messups who run into a bad situation in the desert with a lousy Dodge Durango with super awful air conditioning and a rattlesnake that bites the protagonist right on the .... With a storyline like that, how can you go wrong?