From the schemes to uni to skag: exploring renton’s dual-identities

Irvine Welsh‘s latest novel, Skagboys, is a prequel to his infamous book, Trainspotting, and explores how the friends all became heroin junkies. It’s been a while since I’ve read Trainspotting (I’ve read it twice) but I remember the gist of it and the style. To catch you up: drugs, Brit-pop, drugs, raves, more drugs, sex, more drugs, death, more drugs, theft, more drugs, and one friend screwing over the rest. When Welsh was initially writing Trainspotting, it was much longer, with part of what became Skagboys. At the time, he wasn’t interested in how they became addicts, but recently, he began to wonder how that transition began.

Settling for whoever’s around in Run River by Joan Didion

Run River is about a married couple, the husband’s sister, and the murder that is a result of the affairs the two women have. Lily Knight marries Everett McClellan because he asks her to. She is socially inept and has affairs with men that she does not care for. Martha McClellan has an affair with a man that she does not want to marry but her life implodes when she discovers he is marrying another woman. Everett shoots the man that had an affair with both women.

Becoming an Invisible Monster

The most horrifying stories, according to Chuck Palahniuk, are those that could happen. And the greatest monsters are the invisible ones living within us. He explores this in the reincarnation of his novel, Invisible Monsters, now published as Invisible Monsters, Remix.