Featured writer: Tony O'Neill

Irish blood, English heart, American dreams.

"All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf." Alexander Trocchi

If Tony O'Neill's work reads instantly familiar, that's just your mind playing tricks with echoes of William Burroughs, Nelson Algren and Alexander Trocchi drifting down the ether from 50 years ago, compounded by the emotional honesty of Dan Fante and that down-at-heel Bukowskian atmosphere. As O'Neill said in an interview with Spent Meat: "Rolling around in the gutter for a few years doesn’t cut it anymore, the writing had better be good." O'Neill's writing is better than good.

With a few exceptions, most musicians' transitions to writing have been laughable; O'Neill makes it look easy. He delivers prickly lines like a man who has just realised on his skin is on fire. Digging the Vein, O'Neill's debut semi-autobiographical novel prowls the same god-forsaken wasteland as Denis Johnson, Jim Carroll and Irvine Welsh have walked: brutal, shocking and real.

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