A book written with the relentless precision of Junkie (by William Burroughs), with the anxious exploratory nature of Cain's Book (by Alexander Trocchi), with the desperate humor of a classic noir, with the expressive power of Lowry and Nabokov.
The fragments and pieces of everyday life of a group of young people in their constant movement from the frozen margin to the combustible center of modern cities. The harshness, the immersion in drugs, unemployment, madness, the sense of futility, the corpses of all promising prospects, the outbursts of unpredictable violence but also of wounded lyricism, compose the dark music of this book, a music as aggressive as Punk, as complex and improvisational as Jazz, dynamically melancholic like the Blues.
Irwin Welsh explores the hell of a world that has lost its center, its rhythm, and its coherence, traces it in the jungle of concrete, steel, and frayed social fabric, and crushes us with the material of his exploration.