[In the following review, Allison provides a brief, generally favorable assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of The Acid House.]

This collection of short stories [The Acid House] is a brilliant impression of the postmodern problem of displaced youth. What makes Welsh's darkly humorous stories so remarkable is the contrast within them between new and old. Antisocial characteristics such as misanthropy, sexual perversion, and drug abuse clash with the traditional “old-world” flavor of the UK and its working-class values, friendly pubs, and soccer-team camaraderie. Most of the dialogue is a Scots dialect that forms a rustic veneer for the modern themes of social saturation.

Despite their fascinating social context, most of these stories can be taken lightly, for Welsh's ingenious fantasies give them levity. “The Granton Star Cause” shows us what it would be like to meet God, and what it is like to be invisible. This Kafkaesque piece follows the downward spiral of an amateur soccer player as he loses everything and is finally transformed into a bug by God. In one of the best examples of Welsh's use of Scots dialect, God accounts for his long-criticized absence from the world by saying, “Ah’m no deid; ah jist dinnae gie a fuck.” The title story, about a young punk who switches brains with a newborn baby, is particularly ingenious; it satirizes political correctness when the baby cusses and begs his new-age mother for a juicy steak.

Some of the stories, however, are less fantastic than graphically realistic. For instance, the irony of “Eurotrash” is particularly hard-edged. The main character, Euan, who begins the story emphatically stating: “I was anti-everything and everyone,” later lapses in his antipathy when he is sucked into an inescapable love-triangle with Christina and Richard that is reminiscent of Sartre's No Exit. Welsh's comic stories usually begin and end in the murky depths of dissolution, where even the most dramatic plot-twist is no surprise.