SOURCE: A review of Marabou Stork Nightmares, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 17. No. 2, Summer, 1997, p. 269.

In the following review, Zamsky applauds Marabou Stork Nightmares for its balance of empathy toward and harsh judgment of its wrongdoing narrator.

Welsh is back with the schemies. In his novel The Marabou Stork Nightmares, Irvine Welsh revisits the life of raging Scottish youth with the same fury and honesty as Trainspotting and Acid House. As with his previous books, Welsh displays an almost unsettling ability to sympathetically complicate the lives of loathsome characters. In Nightmares, Welsh writes from the perspective of Roy Strang, a racist, sexist, homophobic budding soccer hooligan. Miraculously, he manages to do so in such a way that while we understand how Strang's own self-loathing conspires with the cruelty of his life to prescribe habitual violence, we still hold him personally responsible for his involvement in a horrific...