Crooked Little Vein Is A Good Book

Or why you should read Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis

Warren Ellis is -or perhaps more accurately, was- one of my all time favourite comic book writers. Much like many of his contemporaries, Mr Ellis has decided, in recent years, to focus on writing prose novels for a living. Crooked Little Vein is his debut novel.

Crooked Little Vein tells the story of hard-on-his-luck private detective Michael McGill and his spunky sidekick/partner/love-interest, Trix, as they go on a mission (given to them by the high-functioning heroin addict US chief of staff) to find an alien-hide bound book containing the secret additional chapters of the US constitution. The pair track the book, used as a kind of underground currency, from sex pervert to fetishist on a depraved cross America trip. Crooked Little Vein is a briskly fun read that is full of voyeuristic delight.

Actually, a better description of this book reads something more like: "Warren Ellis finds horrifying fetishes on the Internet and wishes you to share in his horror." Or maybe: "Warren Ellis writes old fashioned pulp detective story where instead of the hero getting shit-kicked he encounters and experiences weird, disturbing sex things." Or maybe: "a travelogue of how fucking insane the United States seems to everyone else in the world, but with a veneer of awful sex things." Or finally perhaps: "the consequences of someone having the courage and poor manners to publish the results of their surreptitious googling history instead of desperately hiding it like the rest of us." It might go without saying, but I quite enjoyed this book.

(I wouldnt be surprised if Crooked Little Vein, then, uses the some of the same diseased neurons that brought us Fell, Transmetropolitan, and Ellis' Thunderbolts. )

I'd recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Ellis' comics work or who finds human perversion as endlessly fascinating as I do. I'd also recommend this book for your most conservative and elderly relatives, because frankly that would be hilarious.

Previously:
So I Read Ignition City
So I Read Fell: Feral City