the Acid House - Story #1 - The Shooter

Irvine Welsh, author of the movies-made-it-world-famous book "Trainspotting", has other works selling. "Trainspotting" [1993] was his first novel, but since then, the Edinburgh viper wrote much more. I am now reading "Acid House" [1994], while his more recent hit is "Marabou Stork Nightmares".

"Acid House" is a collection of short stories, all very much on the style of "Trainspotting". I must advise people not fluent on english, to NOT read the book on the original, since all the dialogues are written exactly as they are speaken. This means that every dialogue sentence has syntactic errors, on purpose, and they sure are a problem for those still learning the language :)

For example, the book's first story - "The Shooter" - has the following lines, some ten words after its start: "Glad ya like it..." and "Doncha like it?". Obviously, or maybe not so obviously, "ya" stands for "you" and "doncha" stands for "don't you"... Of course these are very soft examples of the syntax you will find... thus my warning...

"The Shooter" runs from pages 1 to 10 and features just 5 personages - Marge, Lisa, Gary, Jock and Withworth - of which your brain will only have to worry with 3: Gary, Jock and Withworth. The story couldn't be more simple: Gary invites Jock for lunch, in order to "teach some respect" to Withworth, using an empty gun and a baseball bat... things don't turn up that simple, but I don't like to be a spoiler and I won't unveil the ending... A good reading.

As I read "Acid House", I will post short reviews of each story.