SOURCE: “Chibs with Everything,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4, 804, April 28, 1995, p. 23.

In the following review of Marabou Stork Nightmares, Hornby lauds Welsh for living up to the promise of his earlier work and providing a fresh, energetic voice in British fiction.

Irvine Welsh's first two books, Trainspotting (1993) and The Acid House (1994), were brilliantly cold-eyed, breathtakingly sordid and indisputably authentic portrayals of young Edinburgh low life—imagine James Kelman rewritten by William Burroughs with Ecstasy as the preferred drug. So exhaustive and definitive were these works that it was hard to see how Welsh could possibly proceed: was he going to continue to mine the same seam, with possibly diminishing returns, or was he going to move on? Queasier readers might have favoured the latter course of action—in Trainspotting, Welsh described, in excruciating detail, a junkie's attempt to retrieve an opium suppository that he has accidentally expelled into...