SOURCE: “Pulp Fiction Turns to True Romance,” in Spectator, Vol. 276, No. 8,758, May 28, 1996, p. 28.

In the following review, Jones compares Welsh to filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, asserting that Welsh's novella collection Ecstasy manages to combine Tarantino-like grotesquerie with genuine warmth.

Reading Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, is like watching Tarantino: exciting, urgent, thrilling, repulsive. With these three stories, though, Welsh has turned his hand to romance. Of course, when he talks of chemistry between people he means a similar taste in narcotics, but that perhaps is the point: in his bleak and despairing fiction the little things (tablets and touches, smiles and smokes) are all the more poignant. The reader is dragged, breath held, through the dregs, but is finally brought to the surface holding a pearl; his romance is convincing because he shows how rare and precious it is.

Welsh is a story-teller. Cast as the enfant terrible of...