Warren Ellis: Crooked Little Vein

Warren Ellis loves to pontificate.  I mean, he really loves it.  This man can pick a topic and expound like a motherfucker.  And he chooses to focus on some of the most random points and expand upon them to build a landscape thats both fascinating and bizarre.

I'll give you an example.  In the opening pages of Warren's first regular book (no pictures here), we meet the miserable Mike McGill, a private detective and self proclaimed "Shit Magnet."  But, as we learn about Mike, we learn that Mike has a rat.  Living in the walls of his office.  The office he sleeps in, eats in, and basically festers in his own filth.   This rat is big.  Its strong.  Its smart.  And its mean.  Throughout the book we learn little tidbits about the rat.  He pissed in Mike's coffee cup.  He absorbed many volts of electricity from a trap Mike set, laughed, and shit on his phone receiver.  And there's plenty more.

This rat has no real purpose within this book, but he's a fine personification of the fact that Mike McGill is a 'Shit Magnet.'  And he really is.

Warren loves to take you on a journey throughout the underbelly of society.  In Transmetropolitan, my favorite comic series, Warren, through the guise of Guerrilla Journalist Spider Jerusalem, takes us all on a trip to a warped future that is much like the reality we see around us and explores everything wrong with that future while Spider searches for truth.  And he does this for the greater good of us all.  He'll beat the shit out of you, break your face, shit in your coffee cup, shoot you with a bowel disruptor so you shit in your own coffee cup, but all because he wants the world to see what is going on around them and get the hell off their collective ass to fix it.  Spider Jerusalem is pure genius.

Mike McGill and Crooked Little Vein is nowhere near as lofty, and in turn nowhere near as cruel and hilarious.  But, its Warren, and I've found that anything Warren writes is worth the read.  In Crooked Little Vein, as I stated earlier, we meet Mike McGill, a PI and Shit Magnet.  Apparently a golden boy who has fallen, Mike doesn't seem to do too much.  Doesn't get many jobs.  But when he does, he accidentally stumbles upon tantric ostrich rape cults (re: Shit Magnet) which scar his mind.  And he sits in his filth and tries to kill the rat.

Then, the Chief of Staff of the President of the United States storms into his office.  Check that, the heroin addicted Chief of Staff who injects monkey feces to fight cancer or some such crap.  Because a Shit Magnet is what they need to find the second secret Constitution of the United States of America.

Suddenly Mike has money, purpose, and a really bad feeling.  Because of course this book has travelled throughout the underbelly of the US since Nixon sold it to a whore.  And now we must follow its trail and perhaps find this book which will save America from its perverted self.  And decide if that is a good thing.

Mike meets a girl, Trix, a spunky punky tattooed sex fiend writing her thesis on the sexual underbelly of America.  A perfect assistant.  And they meet in a secret club of fetishists who only get excited by giant godzilla style lizards having sex.  Yeah, its that kinda book.  

They travel.  They inject saline into their genitals.  There could be love.  They discover that finding this book might be something they don't really want to do.  

So, you have the morality play, the soul searching, and the internet porn.  

Is this the best book ever?  Of course not.  Is this book worth reading?  Absolutely.  It won't take you long.  A few days.  But I promise you that you won't want to stop, and you'll find yourself laughing your ass off pretty much the whole time.  Because Warren Ellis is hilarious.  He's smart, cynical, and driven.  And his characters always reflect him (or so I'm inferring from reading his personal writing).  Warren has a good grip on how fucked up our reality is, and an excellent way of pointing out all that is wrong in a way that will make you laugh while you get angry.  Crooked Little Vein is a great illustration of that.  Sure, there's a bit of a moral. Its a good one.  And we realize perhaps the perversions that plague our country aren't the problem.  Perhaps they are a good thing.  Perhaps they add to the diversity of our little melting pot nation.  Perhaps the normal we've all been living with, that our country has grown up with, is part of the problem.  Look where we are now.  Look at this lovely swamp of shit the normal has gotten us too.  Maybe we need some Godzilla porn obsessed people in our world.

So, give it a shot.  And let me know what you think.

This was my first book review, i think. I feel like I need a good variety of stuff for this blog, and I need to read more. I'll try to read a book a week, but that's not totally realistic. Maybe 2 a month? Not counting Graphic Novels. Let me know what you think of my little book review. CD reviews to follow!