Welsh, Scotland's brightest young literary rebel (The Acid House, stories, p. 181), weighs in with a technically dazzling and emotionally wrenching portrait of working-class youth wasted in an emotional vacuum. Roy Strang, in his early 20s, enters the story in a coma and leaves it in even worse shape. In between, he recounts his wretched childhood in an Edinburgh housing project, introduces us to his horrific parents and abject siblings (a thug, a slut, and a homosexual), and describes his own unfortunate appearance (his ears stick out; and the family dog mauled him as a kid, leaving him with a lifelong limp). Matters get briefly sunnier when Roy's father, who loathes the sorry state of Scotland, drags the family to South Africa, where the 11-year-old Roy romps in a right-wing paradise amid a pedophilic uncle and numerous species of exotic birds, including the marabou stork, a freakish creature that preys on defenseless flamingoes. Welsh knows a writer's metaphor when he sees one, and it's this—the marabou stork—that Roy will come back, in his fevered coma nightmares, to hunt. With great agility, Welsh manages his slippery, three-pronged story as he traces the teenage Roy's return to Scotland, at the same time continuing with the surreal, ongoing pursuit of the marabou stork—a tale that the author tells in the manner of a mock-colonial narrative. In Scotland, Roy grows up to become a fair computer systems analyst and a superb soccer-gang brawler, but he loses stomach for his aimless life after joining his mates in the gang rape of a club girl. Miraculously, the rapists are found innocent, but by then Roy's had enough of Scotland: He moves to Manchester and discovers salvation in rave culture. It can't last, though, particularly with the rape victim setting out to exact grisly revenge . . . . Welsh's grasp of the grim beauty that lurks in his characters' shattered yearnings is even more solid than his ear for their savage dialect. Magical, without a hint of cloying sentiment. (First serial to Grand Street)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03845-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
