The Acid House by Irvine Welsh, Welsh

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Reader Rating: (4 ratings)

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  • Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
  • Pub. Date: April 1995
  • ISBN-13: 9780393312805
  • Sales Rank: 101,346
  • 289pp
 
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Synopsis

Irvine Welsh's scintillating, disturbing, and altogether outrageous collection of stories"the basis for the 1998 cult movie directed by Paul McGuigan.

Annotation

Using a range of approaches from bitter realism to demented fantasy, Irvine Welsh is able to evoke the essential humanity, well hidden as it is, of his generally depraved, lazy, manipulative and vicious characters. He specializes especially in cosmic reversals--God turns a hapless footballer into a fly--always displaying a corrosive wit.

Publishers Weekly

In Welsh's (Trainspotting) gritty proletarian universe, everyone from God to Madonna (the Material Girl, not the Virgin) speaks tough, working-class Scottish dialect: ``That cunt Nietzsche wis wide ay the maark whin he sais ah wis deid,'' confides a prickly, pint-hefting Almighty in a Glasgow pub. ``Ah'm no deid, ah jist dinnae gie a fuck.'' Nihilism and self-absorption characterize the nearly indistiguishable junkies, football hooligans and petty thieves who narrate these edgy, preponderantly first-person stories and one novella. Like fellow Scot James Kelman (whose salty vernacular Welsh's dialogue echoes), Welsh's predatory characters are society's dregs, hard-luck losers pinned to seediness by the empire's decline and by their own low expectations. The plots address this unrelenting grimness with shocking violence or twisted comedy. With the former, Welsh lacks Kelman's chilling incisiveness and tense dramatic control; he's somewhat more successful at broad satire and manic, high-concept humor. When it works, it's hilarious: ``Where the Debris Meets the Sea'' features inventive turnabout, as fanzines and tabloid TV programs about Scottish lorrie drivers feed the sexual fantasies of Madonna and friends. More often, though, the satire lacks teeth, descending instead to weak sarcasm. The title story's inspired premise (an acid tripping malcontent and a yuppie couple's newborn swap souls) fizzles out in conventional, trite pokes at political correctness, men's groups and upward mobility. Author tour. (Apr.)

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Biography

Irvine Welsh is the author of seven works of fiction. Film rights for Porno have been sold to the company that made Trainspotting. He lives in San Francisco.

Customer Reviews

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  • Ratings: 4Reviews: 1

Acid Houseby Anonymous

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January 07, 2005: This man is so brilliant he will blow you away. These stories are so funny and so repulsive at the same time that you can't help but enjoy yourself. I would like to read one fresh Irvine Welsh novel a month and I would be the happiest reader alive. It's too bad that more people will never read him or 'get' him because he is the most phenomenal writer out there. And you don't have to be a young, hip, Euro druggie to appreciate him. I am a 43 year old Texas woman who knows that stumbling on to Irvine Welsh is the best thing that will happen to a reader who craves something extraordinary.