I have a love/hate relationship with Warren Ellis. The first thing I ever read by him, Transmetropolitan, was a comic masterpiece that inspired me to do things like I Hope You’re Happy and Inside. Then I began to read some of the other things he was doing as that series was winding up, and while decent as stories and comics, weren’t up to the same caliber. To be fair, I found them at about the time Transmet was finishing up, they may have been written and released much earlier. I’d have to check and see.
In the wake of Transmet’s end, he put out some real dogs. I remember a story called “Orbiter” or something like that which was released as a hardcover comic that was about two issues in size. The story was about a crew of a space shuttle which had disappeared on a mission, and then returned several years later, covered in flesh and with the crew alive. It landed as usual, the crew was debriefed and held in isolation, and then they decided they liked the now living space shuttle and they climbed back in and took off. That was it, and I began to sour on Warren’s writing. The characters were not very interesting, the conflict was nonexistent and the whole thing seemed to exist as an excuse to put flesh on a space shuttle. I never really saw anybody who had anything to lose in that story, and that’s why it failed.
Then you get to interact with Warren Ellis, the personality who is larger than life, brutish and sardonic in an almost chipper way. I began to realize Warren Ellis has an incredible gift for the profane, an ability to succinctly and freely call out the bullshit of life, and somehow be entertaining at it, and “Orbiter” hadn’t allowed that voice to come out. I also realized that he isn’t a storyteller by craft, more the stories are mediums by which his voice is brought to the masses.
Going into it, I was hoping for something closer to Transmetropolitan, and further from Orbiter. It starts out great. Here’s the opening paragraph:
I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug. It was a huge brown bastard; had a body like a turd with legs and beady black eyes full of secret rat knowledge. Making a smug uffing sound, it threw itself from the table to the floor, and scuttled back into the hole in the wall where it had spent the last three month planning new ways to screw me around. I’d tried nailing wood over the gap in the wainscot, but it gnawed through it an spat the wet pieces in my shoes. After that I spiked bait with warfarin, but the poison seemed to somehow cause it to evolve and become a super-rat. I nailed it between the eyes one with a lucjy shot with the butt of my gun, but it got up again and shat in my telephone.
That’s the Warren Ellis I know and love. His freedom of expression is practically unmatched.
The story of Crooked Little Vein is of a detective, Mike McGill who is hired by the White House Chief of Staff to find a book, an alternate version of the Constitution written by the founding fathers to be enacted when things in the country became a little too crazy to control anymore. You see, in their infinite wisdom, the founding fathers knew their little document wouldn’t suffice totally for the future, so they planned ahead. The catch is, by reading the book, those in the live audience would become hypnotized, brainwashed, and just go along with it, kind of like a Fox News viewer. Thing is, the book has become a bargaining chip for people who have power and got into a little, uh, trouble. Think about Bill Clinton when his relationship with Lewinsky was made public. If he had the book, he’d give it to Ken Starr in exchange for silence on the matter, and then Ken Starr would get caught with, say the pool boy, and he’d have to give it to somebody else and so on.
So Mike McGill sets off into the underbelly of America, to experience first-hand the oddest of fetishes, cults, and power hungry families in search of the book. Did I mention that Mike is as straight an arrow as you could ever find?
After his first run in with perversion, he meets his companion for the adventure, Trix. She’s a freeloving modern girl of the underground who thinks this sounds like a great adventure, and something about writing a thesis that never really gets addressed again.
On his journey, Mike comes face to face with a reality he might not have been prepared for, namely, that weird is normal, freaky fetish is main street, and that he should just lighten up about all of that stuff.
The tone of the book is unwaveringly strange. Ellis confronts the reader with as much strangeness as can be handled at any one point in time, and it gets really hard for the uninitiated to distinguish fact from fiction, or real versus made up, or in other words, which fetishes and oddballs are actually out there, and what aren’t. I really admire Ellis’s voice, his facility in creating brilliantly fun voice.
On the other hand, the book is paced incredibly quickly. It felt like I could read 10 pages in a minute, which was just too fast. The speed in storytelling didn’t allow him to slow down and develop characters and the danger of the plot. Because I didn’t really feel the characters were more than devices of the story, I was never really concerned when they got into trouble, and since the story was told so fast, I never got the feeling the characters were in danger, in over their heads, or so fucked it was hopeless unless they just broke down the door and hoped to get some lucky hits in. It always felt like Mike was going to find his way through a problem, nothing would ever go wrong, and nothing did. In short it was too easy for them to achieve their objectives.
And also, in the end, when of course the private dick and the dame were deciding if they were going to stay together, I didn’t believe it for a second. On the other hand, it is a fast, entertaining read, so don’t worry about getting too caught up in something with little payoff. There’s nothing like Warren Ellis’s twisted vision, and for its faults, it was still a worthwhile read.
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