Crooked Little Vein: Warren Ellis's novel now in paperback
Crooked Little Vein in paperbackWarren Ellis's first novel, "Crooked Little Vein" is about what you'd expect from the Internet's most gonzo celebrant of the kinky, deviant, gross, hard-boiled and manic. Like Hunter S Thompson with an Internet connection, Ellis's hard-boiled detective story veers into hilarious gross-out turf from the first page, when a heroin-addicted presidential chief of staff charges the narrator of the book to retrieve a holy relic. The relic is a record of the "true" constitution of the United States, containing the mystical spell that Benjamin Franklin composed after killing an alien who had been sodomizing him in a hotel room in Paris. The book -- bound in the alien's skin -- has the power to restore America to colonial morality, banishing its Internet-era perversions. But first it must be retrieved from its current owner -- whomever has inherited title from the hooker to whom Nixon gifted it as a hush-up bribe.
This storyline - a hardboiled dick and his h4wt, tattooed, polyamorous sidekick -- is the perfect vehicle for a blazing, hilarious tour across America and its myriad daytime talk-show perversions (the narrator has his balls injected with saline in the first fifty pages). Ellis is a connoisseur of the weird and squicky, and he's saved his best material for us in this volume. This is a book that would make Goatse blush in places, and laugh in others, and do some discreet mail-order shopping in others.
But there's more to this book than just chuckles. Slyly hidden in this book's depths is an absolutely brilliant little message about the how and why of Internet perversity, the reason that America and the world have found themselves getting magnificently weirder in the last decade, and why that's a Good Thing. This is a celebration of following one's weird, one that is open-eyed to the pain and problems of that path, and one that embraces it anyway.
Ellis is a great storyteller, and this little sucker just rips along. I just finished it in 90 minutes on an airplane and it left me hungry for more. Go on and read this one, it's NSFW-ariffic.
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I would be curious to see Goatse's book reviews.
"I would be curious to see Goatse's book reviews"
He exposes the holes in every plot...
I would be curious to see Goatse's book reviews.
I'm not to fond of his rating system, everything always gets a 'thumbs up'.
This is the only Warren Ellis I've read - but I heartily recommend it to anyone with intestinal fortitude. Watch out for people with saline and needles... don't trust them...
I can't get to the bookstore quick enough!
How many people like goatse anyway?
Can we see a show of hands?
Is this the same Warren Ellis who was part of the fantastic band The Dirty Three?
The same one who is now one of the Bad Seeds?
If so, he is brilliant.
I didn't know he wrote too.
Nope, it appears not.
Author
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Ellis
Musician
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Ellis_%28musician%29
i just finished reading this (hardback) the other day. can't recommend it enough :)
304 pages in 90 minutes. If I were Ellis, I would not want to read that. You agonize over something for months and then some dude swallows it whole on a hop between cities (no Goatse connections intended).
Please, please, PLEASE stop feeding Warren's ego by equating him with the late, great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Warren Ellis isn't fit to drink Hunter's used toilet water.
Transmetropolitan, while great, was one giant masturbatory, "I wish I were HST" fantasy.
#10: Its a compliment and testiment to a well written (or at least really fun) book that someone would plow through it that quickly. Anyone who'd get huffy cause someone read their book "too fast" is way, way, way way way too full of themselves. After all everyone reads at different speeds, who is anyone to tell anyone how fast they should or shouldn't be reading? :P
#11: everyone's got different opinions.
Definitely a strange little book.
Toward the end I kept seeing little bits of the writer's machinery poking through that was a bit distracting, and it seemed like Ellis just ran out of steam in the last chapter.
But, no accounting for taste! If you like your fiction fast, weird and out of control, you could do worse.
The sexy passages were, um, interesting, too.
I love Warren Ellis, but is it really necessary to post an entry for every paperback that comes out?
#12: If some of us tend to react badly whenever someone compares Ellis to HST, it may be on account of this. Ellis made his reputation with the hipster crowd largely on the basis of Transmetropolitan, which really is nothing more than Hunter S. Thompson In The Future, and some thought that it was a pretty shabby excuse for an elegy.
@11: I loved Warren's Transmet, and while right about the whole HST fantasy, it was engaging, written brilliantly, and visually engrossing throughout.
When Cory initially posted about the 1st chapter excerpt of this book and I read it, however, I cringed at Ellis' inability to translate the over-the-top wit to extended, novel prose. It seemed like he works best with short, punchy, outlandish exchanges, but stringing those together just flooded the page with an inelegant excess that seemed to crowd the unfolding scene itself -- less William Burroughs or HST than he may have hoped.
And here I am still waiting for the follow-up to Fell: Feral City.
Wow! Warren Ellis using gross out, drug addicted mania in his storytelling! Wow! That's so original for him. It's amazing how consistent he can be with gross out drug stuff and deviant sex in EVERYTHING he does. Wow. It's so original in yet another work by him that its not like I've read that same exact stuff in EVERY comic he's ever written. I just wouldn't know how to react to Warren Ellis doing something clever and original and uplifting! It's just not a visit to the edge of art if Warren doesn't have some kind of deviant sex or cynical drug fueled put down of stuff that he knows fuck all about! I just couldn't feel so hip if I couldn't read this, then turn to the pages of X-Men where he totally sells himself out for cash every month! You go Warren! No Hunter Thompson knock off, oh no sir. Your inconsequential depressed holier than thou cynical hipsterism is as comfortable and routine as my grandma!
I laughed my ass off even though (or because) one of my favourite movie genres will be forever tainted in my mind.
#15 Sorry you don't like it, man. Warren's an almost absurdly versitile writer and all the better for it. You really think Ocean was the exact same stuff as Planetary and Fell? That's pretty mind-boggling, boss.
Despite, because of, or just coincidentally to -- all the sex, drugs, weird fetishes and general gross-out deviancy -- it's still a decent enough, though kind of short, story, and I couldn't shut up about it when I read it the hardcover last Christmas.
I think Ellis is better suited as a comics writer. All his flaws seem to be magnified in Crooked Little Vein: clunky prose, painful dialog, and his characters are made of cardboard. Seriously, a paragraph or a sentence does not constitute a chapter, no wonder Doctorow blew through it on a plane ride.
There are plenty of funny and interesting ideas bumping around in there, but in the end I was embarrassed to have it on my shelf. Save your money and hit up the library if you're curious.
Probably worth noting that the paperback includes some extra material not included in the hardcover, like an essay by Ellis on the source material, an interview, etc. Also, that's the cover for the hardback you've got on display. The cover for the paperpack has an orange snake. It's on Ellis's blog:
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=6185
Decent enough story, but thematically monotonous.
After the second time I was explicitly told that "This is mainstream now!" I thought that the book needed a better editor. Someone to say: "Warren. They get it."
@11 0 Warren Ellis isn't fit to drink Hunter [S. Thompson]'s used toilet water.
Having read some Thompson, I'm not sure that's an insult.
I just finished reading the hardback edition of "Crooked Little Vein" last night, and I thought it was fun, but not quite up to the depth that the Vonnegut comparisons made by the dust jacket. Neither is it as poignant as the work of Thompson, who several people have mentioned here. His observations lack the bite of such authors.
His writing style is good, there's plenty of laughs, but I didn't walk away feeling like it left much of a lasting impression. It was like really exotic cotton candy.
It could partly be his inexperience with the medium. I'd definitely check out his next book, just to see how he's developing.
@24 "It was like really exotic cotton candy."
Exactly! I'm no Ellis-hater, I have enjoyed several of his works, but I found that Crooked Little Vein just didn't live up to the hype its been given. Amusing in parts, yes, but ultimately a trifle. I kept reading it wondering where the "Goatse blush" parts were going to begin. Maybe, thanks to the Internet, I have seen too much, but I was resoundingly underwhelmed on the whole.
I liked CLV. I do agree that it had some moments that felt contrived and clunky (Warren really needs to explore away from his 'rebellious young fetish/deviant girl as a main character' obsession). still though it was a fun story full of some very crazy moments. I look forward to him doing some more non-comic work to see what direction he goes in next.
And really #17, you need to read 'Fell' if you think he is a one trick pony. 'Fell' is a great piece of comics noir.
I bought the CLV hardback when it came out, pre-ordered it in fact. Emailed Warren Ellis on July 31, 2007 and said:
"Liked the book. You are up there with Hunter Thompson in my literary pantheon. "
I too thought that he totally dropped the ball towards the end of the story, page 262 to be exact. (Remember that he whipped off the the first part of the book which then sat at his editors unfinished for a long time before he finally wrote the end.) There is no way his out of shape PI could cut through a floor with a knife from a perch on a drop ceiling....
Last line of my letter:
" 'deus ex machina' sounds like the title of your next book. Write it. I'll buy a copy."
Read this book straight through from cover to cover yesterday. I thought it was wonderfully weird and compelling, something like what a Phillip Marlowe book would be like if Marlowe kept a gimp in the front office or if Nick and Nora Charles had been junkies investigating the case of the missing golden showers.
What did anyone else think of Ellis' assertion that there isn't such a thing as private perversion anymore, that the internet has made subculture sexuality mainstream?
He had me convinced...