Crooked Little Vein

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by Shadowmancer | Dec 09 2007

There are writers who inspire me. There are writers who make me feel horribly inadequate. And there are writers who simply make me stare slackjawed in awe of the shit they think up. I picked up Warren Ellis’ debut novel, Crooked Little Vein yesterday afternoon. It’s an oddly sized hardback, slim and small, perhaps to more easily fit into someone’s small intestine.

I should have known what to expect, I’ve read Transmetropolitan and Lazarus Churchyard, and I read his blog fairly regularly. Joss Whedon’s cover blurb says “I think this book ate my soul.” William Gibson just wrote “[s]top it. You’re frightening me.” But I’m not sure anything could prepare me for this book.

Hunter S. Thompson might have backed away slowly, muttering.

The book is about Mike McGill, private eye. It’s written like some demented mix of the aforementioned H.S.T., Charles Manson and Raymond Chandler. McGill is hired by the President’s Chief of Staff to hunt down and recover a book: the second, hidden Constitution of the United States of America. The book, you see, was the source of our prosperity and moral rectitude until Nixon traded it to a prostitute for her favors. Mike McGill is hired because he’s a “shit magnet.” Life just sort of happens to him. Most of this is explained in the same conversation where the Chief of Staff holds forth on the pleasures of heroin use, dancing, and, well, spraying feces across a fancy hotel room.

Ellis, along with Grant Morrison and Garth Ennis, has always exemplified a sort of splattershock writing style that helped define Vertigo comics in the post-Sandman era. Comics like Transmetropolitan, Preacher, and The Invisibles had a way of latching onto you and shaking you, like a dog’s chew toy. They weren’t for the faint of heart, and they definitely weren’t for the weak of stomach. But they all had something to say. Under the bile and grotesquery, each of them was a caustic and spot-on shot at some aspect of society. Politics, religion, philosophy, nothing was– or is– sacred to these guys.

Crooked Little Vein pokes fun at the political machine of the US, but more importantly, it questions the divide between mainstream and underground culture, and what dictates “underground,” anyway, in a world where the internet had largely democratized the class “velvet underground.” Everyone knows about things that would have been swept under the carpet or kept secret even twenty years ago. Furries and bondage aficionados, people into all sorts of kinks can not only find places where they fit in on the internet, they no longer feel like they have to hide. Thanks to the internet, we are all loved and hated pretty equally. For every flaming asshole, there’s someone ready to accept us, even support us.

That, and the fact that it’s harder to control the flow of information, is what this book is about. It’s also a complete mindrape. And you’ll never get the stains off.

Rating: 8/10
Tags: review, writers, warren ellis, books

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