Books like Porno
Kill Your Friends wears the shark’s grin of Porno; A Visit from the Goon Squad carries its quieter fear that hustlers, addicts and dreamers eventually have to reckon with time. Glue completes the trio by revealing how much tenderness Welsh can hide beneath obscenity and violence.
If you liked Porno, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with Porno, and we tell you exactly what.
Steven Stelfox, a record-company executive in 1997 London, is Sick Boy’s corporate cousin: vain, predatory, chemically fortified and horribly persuasive. Niven lets his narrator dissect colleagues and artists with such venomous precision that disgust keeps turning into guilty laughter.
The kinship lies deeper than bad behaviour. Like Porno, this is a comedy about desire becoming commerce: sex, music, friendship and identity are valuable only while somebody can sell them. Niven worked in the record industry, and that firsthand knowledge gives the grotesquerie a convincing bureaucratic texture. Now a cult satire of the Britpop business, Kill Your Friends offers the intoxicating pleasure of being trapped inside the mind of a man who mistakes appetite for intelligence.
Egan follows a loose network of musicians, executives, assistants and damaged friends, changing viewpoint and form as their lives collide and diverge. The book shares Porno’s fascination with reinvention: everyone is editing the story of who they were, usually while somebody else remembers the less flattering version.
Its tone is less savage, but its structure supplies a comparable ensemble charge. Minor figures seize whole chapters; a compromised person in one voice becomes unexpectedly moving in another. Even the famous PowerPoint chapter earns its formal gamble through emotional exactness. Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, this is that rare decorated novel whose experimentation makes its characters more immediate, not less. It finds the ache hidden inside the hustle.
If Porno made you care about its liars despite every reason not to, Glue is Welsh’s fullest exploration of that achievement. It tracks four Edinburgh friends across decades, moving among voices, classes, ambitions and private codes of loyalty. The language has Welsh’s familiar voltage—dialect, insults, bodily comedy—but the long span gives every boast and betrayal accumulating weight.
This is not simply more Trainspotting territory. Glue is broader, warmer and more patient: a working-class social novel disguised as a succession of fights, jokes, binges and disasters. Many devoted Welsh readers rank it among his most humane books because it understands friendship as both refuge and trap. Reading it reveals the emotional architecture beneath Porno’s frantic plotting—and makes Welsh’s fictional Edinburgh feel larger, older and harder to escape.