I remember the first time I read this book I was 16 and ignoring English class to read this book. My mouth was agape at the ending and I had to leave the room to gasp audibly.

12 years later wow this book is so so awful. I hate the tropes and the "dressed as a woman" schizophrenic who was a child of rape blah blah.

I will give this book only a slight pass in the way that it formed my love for trash in a significant way.

The best schizoid worm-infested shit you could pick up at a service station to endure a trip on a plane, train or automobile. Pulp so decentralised it can’t even be mashed together. Same rules apply. ( )

Beautifully horrifying, as one would expect!
I'm glad I didn't see the film before reading this, as no matter how hard I try I simply can't imagine James McAvoy as such a character. ( )

Filth You know about hard boiled crime fiction and noire?....well this is more than that.....it is putrid, it is decaying, rotting, stinking, disgusting, it is foul. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth as you read it. You will start to itch and feel scabby. You will want to vomit ad probably will then wish you hadn't. You will want to hold your nose and block your ears. You will cringe and shrink from normal human beings, you will forget about nice and wonder if you will ever know clean  again. But you won't put it down until it is finished. It is vile. ( )

If you indulge in Irvine Welsh then expect to be shocked, his writing and his descriptions are at times excruciatingly painful to read. Sergeant Bruce Robertson is a typical Welsh character, he takes what he wants lives life to access and does not care if his actions harm or destroy anyone in the process. He is at heart a narcissist possessing an inflated sense of his own importance involved in numerous female liasions with little or no empathy for others. However underneath this facade is a very troubled possibly suicidal man, and the author uses a very clever way to disclose this to the reader. Robertson's use of alcohol and recreational drugs, with little or no intake of nutrition, have caused a deterioration in his health and he appears to be harboring an intestinal worm. This parasite becomes the main source of information for the detectives's increasingly bizarre behaviour, a very original and highly entertaining element in a narration not for the faint hearted. ( )