Name: Crooked Little Vein
ISBN: 9780060723934

Warren Ellis

Burned-out private detective Michael McGill is covertly hired to locate an alternative fallback version of the Constitution, an assignment that is complicated by a polyamorous sidekick and a haphazard introduction to an unorthodox use of warm saltwater.

A Novel

Crooked Little Vein

Matthew Rasnake

** spoiler alert **
           This book (the paperback version anyway), is 277 pages that feels like 150. I'm not saying that's necessarily a good thing, but it is a quick read.

The plot, such as it is, feels to me like an over simplified scaffolding from which the author was able to hang his depravity and infatuation with the absurd and perverse. The unfortunate thing is that the scenes and descriptions of deviant sexual behavior and bodily functions both human and inhuman pretty much always felt gratuitous. I say it's unfortunate because these elements are what constituted most of this short work. The smaller part of the novel was devoted to developing the two main characters, who were both, by the end of the novel fairly well defined.

Where the author had opportunities to explore the humanity of the sub-characters involved, he largely missed out. For the most part, his treatment of the perverse activities and their participants was superficial, despite being graphically descriptive. There were a few instances where he'd flesh out a sub-character and delve a bit, but for the most part, they were cardboard cutouts.

As for the main characters and their arc, he did much better. The main character, Mike, is a somewhat older, insecure but self-assured private dick, with poor luck and few friends. When the book opens, he's very much in a place where things happen to him. By the close, he has progressed to the point where he's exerting more control over his own life.
Trix, his companion, starts the book as a run-of-the-mill enlightened, semi-mystic, street-smart, liberated young woman. Her arc is smaller, leaving her at the end of the novel giving up some of her independence.

If you're a fan of Ellis, you'll undoubtedly enjoy this book, though you may end up wishing for a little less shock and a little more substance. If you're *really* a fan of Ellis, you may think I'm an idiot. If you're not a fan of Ellis, well... maybe you should pick up a few trades of Transmetropolitan first to get your toes wet.

Warren Ellis is a sick little monkey, and if you're not a fan of sick little monkeys, or of gratuitous (or even appropriate) filth, muck, and depravity, then you might want to think twice before picking this one up. The book is good, but not good enough that you need to subject yourself to it if you're somewhat easily offended.

Kayleigh hughes

The book opens with a rat taking a piss in a coffee cup while the narrator, Mike McGill, Private 'Invest gator', drags himself through the doldrums of a morning routine with very little ease. Mike has an uncanny knack as a P.I and worked his way well up a private film before deciding to go solo. Ever since he's been plagued by the most revolting luck, he's a self-proclaimed shit magnet, finding himself investigating only the most perverse elements of underground America. Soon after waking and stumbling around his dirty and trashed office he's visited by the President's Chief of Staff, who is a smart-talking asshole who shoots heroin. (I think you can guess from just that how insane this book will be.) He gives Mike half a million dollars to track down a book, a book that contains a second constitution, "it details the real intent of their design of American society, and twenty-three invisible amendments to be read and adhered to only by the presidents, vice-presidents and Chiefs of Staff." Bound in the skin of an extra-terrestrial that hounded Ben Franklin, the book vibrates lightly at the same frequency as the human eye thereby forcing you to read it. It was lost when Nixon gave it to a woman living on a houseboat and the trail has been cold for many years. It's Mike's job to rekindle the trail and find the book for the president.

You find all that out within the first five pages, the next 300 follows Mike's descent into the seediest and most bizarre and disgusting of America's underbelly, as he hops across the country looking for the book. His first search point is a cinema for macroherpetophiles, people who get off watching videos of Godzilla spliced with porn scenes of people in Godzilla masks. That sets the tone for the rest of the hunt, some are a little more harmless, homosexual bodybuilders who inject their scrotums with saline and oil tycoons who hoover up cocaine with an altered diving tank and mask, while others are downright disturbing and vomit-inducing. (I'll save you from a description, you can discover for yourself when you read the book.)

Ellis obviously thinks the world has gone a wee bit mad, especially when you consider that much of the content of the book (other than the compelling second constitution) is a barely exaggerated version of what really is readily available on the internet and on the fringes of society. Whether you believe it's as important, prominent or as likely to go mainstream as Ellis shows it in this book is up for debate, but the book reminds us of the dark and disturbing possibilities that linger in our future.

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Melody Izard

I had to stop several times while reading this book to pick the grit out of my teeth. This book is full of sentences that contain words and ideas that had me running, not to the old reliable Webster desk-sized dictionary (which includes words like cunt and fuck) but to Google to help me understand just what Godzilla Bukkake might mean. 

Michael McGill is a burned out private investigator, who is down to his last $3.41. He gets a visit from a new client who wants him to find a book which contains the “alternate constitution”. Supposedly the founding fathers wrote this constitution designed to be used if the American people slipped into depravity and McGill’s new client, the president’s heroin-addicted chief-of-staff, feels that now is the time to put this constitution into effect. However it disappeared several years ago and McGill’s job is to wade through the porn fields and track it down and return it to the president.

Michael Cowell

Burned-out private dick Michael McGill needs to jump-start his career. What he gets instead is a cattle prod to the crotch. The president's heroin-addicted chief of staff wants McGill to find the Constitution—the real one the Founding Fathers secretly devised for the time of gravest crisis. And with God, civility, and Mom's homemade apple pie already dead or dying, that time is now. But McGill has a talent for stumbling into every imaginable depravity—and this case is driving him even deeper into America's darkest, dankest underbelly, toward obscenities that boggle even his mind.

Crooked Little Vein A Novel