Crooked Little Vein

by Warren Ellis

book data

1,262 ratings, 3.74 average rating, 348 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		23%
4		38%
3		26%
2		8%
1		1%

edit

published

July 24th 2007 by William Morrow

binding

Hardcover, 304 pages

isbn

0060723939 (isbn13: 9780060723934)

description

Michael McGill is a burned-out private detective who suddenly becomes enlisted by an army of presidential goons to retrieve the Constitution of the Un...more

find at: Amazon | Half.com | Barnes & Noble | compare prices ($3.51)…

new topic
discuss this book

topics	posts	views	last activity
The Next Best Boo...: Author Alphabet	2765	1549	5 hours, 29 min ago
100+ Book Challenge: koralute's books of 2008	6	525	12/24/2008 05:57PM
Room 110, Period 4: What writers do: Imagery	20	20	11/24/2008 11:32AM

friend reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

lists with this book

Books I Am Going to Hell For Reading

42 books | 49 voters

Now thats REALLY freakin' Weird....

27 books | 12 voters

More lists...

other reviews (showing 1-20 of 1,762)

sort: default (?) | date
filters: all | text-only

11/21/07

Noah Soudrette rated it:

Read in September, 2007

recommends it for: Warren Ellis fans, comic book fans, pulp fans, and fans of bizzare sexual practices

Boy, where do I start with this one? First off, let me warn those who find certain fetishes, or sexual behaviors, to be weird or disturbing, that this novel may bother you greatly. However, it also may change how you view "weird" sexuality. It's not that this book is only about sex. It's not. It's just mostly about sex. What people find pleasurable in a sexual context varies wildly here. We see everything from Godzilla porn, to saline injections into the testicles and labia, to ST...more Boy, where do I start with this one? First off, let me warn those who find certain fetishes, or sexual behaviors, to be weird or disturbing, that this novel may bother you greatly. However, it also may change how you view "weird" sexuality. It's not that this book is only about sex. It's not. It's just mostly about sex. What people find pleasurable in a sexual context varies wildly here. We see everything from Godzilla porn, to saline injections into the testicles and labia, to STD Russian roulette, to latex injections into the ass of a tranny hooker. Does this book attempt to bring into light some of the stranger sexual activities that go on under the surface of our society? Not at all. In fact, this book believes these things stand boldly in the light all ready.

If one were to try and nail down the main thematic thrust of this novel, it would be the nature of what we call "mainstream" in our culture. Our main character is Mike. Mike's the kind of guy life shits all over, so he tends to stay away from life whenever possible. Part of Mike's problem is all the weird stuff he encounters in his job. Mike eventually meets Trix who tries to change his perspective on his life. Most people would call Trix a weird chick. While Trix is a student of the "weird", she doesn't see it that way. In Trix's mind, that which is easily accessible by your average person, is as much a part of the mainstream as anything else. Here's an example. Anal sex was once a very taboo subject and it was nearly impossible for someone to find any film or photos depicting the act. Well, nowadays, it seems everyone has anal sex (slight exaggeration) and anyone can bring up photos or videos of this act in seconds on the internet, or go out to the store and buy a magazine or video. As odd as it sounds, anal sex is mainstream. It is through this criteria that Trix posits things like Godzilla porn and saline injections into ones testicles, which one can find info on in a few seconds online, is also now mainstream because of this fact. Personally, I'd never heard of the whole saline-in-the-nuts practice before. When I mentioned it to a coworker one day, he knew all about it. We're talking about a very straight shooter here too. He just happened to accumulate knowledge of this practice somewhere along the line, be it on TV, a book, or the internet. Frankly, whether you agree or disagree with this definition of mainstream is moot. The point here is to simply get you thinking about your perspectives. Personally, after talking to my coworker, I'm inclined to go along with the point.

Now, I don;t want to give you the impression this is all there is to this book. This is still a highly amusing hard boiled crime/detective novel in the vein of Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler. The thing that surprised me the most about this book (yes, even more than testicles the size of large melons) was how invested I became in the characters. You really care about this people, and Mike and Trix make a great team. I hope to see them again in future novels. For a first effort, Warren Ellis has really hit it out of the park.(less)

Like this review? yes (5 people liked it)

1 comment

08/28/07

Bryant Durrell rated it:

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in August, 2007

Warren Ellis reads the Internet, and if I didn't read the Internet I could learn a lot about the perverse side of society by reading this book. Unfortunately, I do read the Internet, so it's not really news.

And then there's the point at which a bunch of people tell the protagonist he needs to shut up and participate in their particular kink or they won't give him the information they need. This is not depicted as a negative thing, oddly. Isn't there a word for that?

Like this review? yes (4 people liked it)

add a comment

01/02/08

Jason Pettus rated it:

Read in January, 2008

(My full review of this book is much longer than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:].)

All hail Warren Ellis! Er, don't smack me for saying that, Mr. Ellis! For that's a big reason why so many people so passionately love this "weird" author, gonzo blogger and comics veteran; because he takes no sh-t, rarely grants interviews, calls people to the carpet in public when they're in the w...more (My full review of this book is much longer than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:].)

All hail Warren Ellis! Er, don't smack me for saying that, Mr. Ellis! For that's a big reason why so many people so passionately love this "weird" author, gonzo blogger and comics veteran; because he takes no sh-t, rarely grants interviews, calls people to the carpet in public when they're in the wrong, and will pursue fights with both individuals and corporations as long as he feels he needs to, sometimes simply to make a theoretical point. But then again, many feel that he's earned the right to be this way; still technically in his thirties (he turns 40 later this year), he's been professionally involved in mainstream comics now since 1994, is the author of one of the most beloved transgressive titles of all time (Vertigo's Transmetropolitan), writes a column for postmodern porn site Suicide Girls, writes another column about the videogame Second Life for the mainstream news agency Reuters, wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film adaptation of Castlevania: Dracula's Curse, and has even been ascribed by Wikipedia (take that as you will) as having more trade publications in print than any other comics professional alive. Whew! ALL HAIL WARREN ELLIS! Ow, why'd you smack me?!

And now you can add "novelist" to this unending list of achievements under Ellis' belt, damnit; just last summer, in fact, saw the publication of his first full-length prose book, the deeply subversive fictional look at America's real cultural underground, Crooked Little Vein. In fact, this is an excellent place to start when talking about the book, is the circumstances behind it -- that I'm not exaggerating, it really is based mostly on true "stories of the weird" that actually exist in the real world, most of which Ellis learned about because of the devoted readers of his various websites and fan forums. This is what Ellis does, after all, both as a hobby and a profession, is endlessly sift through the cultural detritus of society, finding just the strangest of the strange and floating it up enough for all of us to see it too. If you're already a fan, for example, of such classic transgressive projects as The Illuminatus Trilogy and Church of the Sub-Genius, you're going to immediately understand where Ellis is coming from here with Crooked Little Vein and what he's trying to artistically accomplish; and if you're not familiar with these projects already, then hold on, buddy, 'cause you're in for a bumpy ride.

Because "transgressive," when all is said and done, is basically about ripping the cover off safe and bland mainstream society, about...(less)

Like this review? yes (2 people liked it)

add a comment

07/17/07

Sean rated it:

Hard-boiled, down-on-his-luck, borderline alcoholic chain-smoking detective meets young, promiscuous female ambassador of Lower East Side counterculture. Adventure and rancid dick jokes inevitably ensue.

I love Ellis. Love the man. He's a mix of Thompson with more animus and Vonnegut without that pesky undercurrent of charming humanism. That said, this novel will not for a second surprise anyone familiar with his work. 'Crooked Little Vein' has a well-fueled plot engine, scenes that c...more

Like this review? yes (3 people liked it)

2 comments

08/06/07

Toby rated it:

Read in July, 2007

recommends it for: few

Wow, was this book disappointing. What should have been Ellis's introduction to the print world became a collection of hey-guys-look-at-this-crazy-shit-I-found-on-the-internet-and-posted-on-my-blog-already, strung together by the thinnest of narratives. There are occasional sentences that smack of the author's way with words, but it's hardly worth the trudge through the rest of the book.

Like this review? yes (2 people liked it)

add a comment

11/10/07

ally rated it:

Read in January, 2007

recommends it for: no one

like a really horrible, pretentious attempt at a Penny Dreadful. trying to be sick and weird for the sake of being sick and weird. any point/lesson was blatant and repeated/shoved down throat. painful to read

Like this review? yes (2 people liked it)

add a comment

09/27/08

Dirk rated it:

Not too long ago I posted a rant against Warren Ellis and said I wouldn’t buy this book because he was a dog hatin bitch. I was blogging under the infuence though and I did end up buying the book. I like his writing and lots of people were saying this was a fun book. Also, we were just about to take off for the coast (the softcover edition of the book came out the day before our trip) and I really wanted something fun to read for the 5 hour drive. So, there ya go.

The book is fun. I...more Not too long ago I posted a rant against Warren Ellis and said I wouldn’t buy this book because he was a dog hatin bitch. I was blogging under the infuence though and I did end up buying the book. I like his writing and lots of people were saying this was a fun book. Also, we were just about to take off for the coast (the softcover edition of the book came out the day before our trip) and I really wanted something fun to read for the 5 hour drive. So, there ya go.

The book is fun. I don’t think it’s as good as some of the raves (and blurbs) say, but that’s all opinion and everybody gets those for free. Basic story, this detective is a ’shit magnet’. Weird stuff, usually bad weird stuff, happens to him all the time. He’s about to throw in the towel when the President’s Chief of Staff hires him to find a lost ’secret Constitution of the U.S.’ and gives him a huge expense account to find it with.

And off it goes. Sort of a road trip detective novel with a bunch of weird stuff throw in. And by weird stuff I mostly mean strange sexual fetish type stuff. Honestly, reading about that kind of stuff is usually not my cup of tea but Ellis is a good enough writer to pull it off and make the book fun.

I liked the book and if Warren Ellis writes another novel, I’ll probably read that one too.

However… I know the author has little if any control over the pricing of a book. Harper Perennial is the publisher of the softcover version of the book and I blame them, the greedy hos. This book is not the standard large trade paperback size nor is it the standard small regular back pocket paperback size. It’s somewhere in between. The book is one of Harper Perennial’s “P.S.” books, that means at the end of the book it has some supplemental material. In this case that is 10 pages of crap like ‘meet the author’, ‘A conversation with Warren Ellis’ and ‘In the kitchen with Warren Ellis’, which makes up the bulk of the supplemental material with 6 pages of recipes by Warren Ellis. Whatever. It’s a bullshit lameass excuse to crank up the price on the book. If you’re interested in this Warren Ellis apocrypha, go to his website like everybody else does. There’s a ton more of that kind of stuff there and it’s free.

This book is kind of short, I thought. It’s 275 pages and it seems like the font is kind of big or something. I read it fast. I would have finished it in the 5 hour trip to the coast if I had kept reading, as it was I finished it while sitting around the camp the next day. The total cost of this freaky softcover confection? $13.95. It’ll be the last book I buy from Harper Perennial and I’m saying that cold sober, so it’s law. Yah, I should have noticed all this when I bought it but I was in a hurry and stoked about getting the book. Anyway, not something Warren has any control over, unlike his hatred of dogs, the bastard.(less)

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

04/07/08

Party rated it:

recommended to Party by: Jesus.
recommends it for: professional prodigious perverts. Or, people who inject saline into their balls. Party time.

My review: This is a fun and insane book, a tourist throught the most classic of American genres, the detective novel. Mixed in with one of those American road trips and a skin in the vein of what Chuck Palahniuk used to do so well and now does so cliche (in fact, I'd go so far as to say that Ellis makes Palahniuk look like Judy Blume with this book). It's also a parody of those books where someone from a more erudite and critical culture (usually the Brits) points out how sick we are and shoves...more

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

11/29/07

Rose rated it:

Read in October, 2007

recommends it for: illustrate a point.

I'm still not sure why I read this. Probably because I really enjoy a lot of the comics he's behind: Hellblazer is one of my favorite series, Planetary and The Authority were well-done, and Global Frequency was great if disappointingly short-lived. There's a lot I don't like about his comic book work, too: it's over-the-top, immature, kind of misogynist and pretty egoistical. As it turned out, I disliked Crooked Little Vein for the same reasons. Purple prose, one-dimensional characters masquerad...more

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

08/09/07

Fogus rated it:

Read in August, 2007

recommends it for: Rob Pete Sarah

Look, if you've read any Warren Ellis, then you've read this book. However, the structure of this first novel was more like an episode of The Family Guy than Transmetropolitan. Similarly to Transmet however, there is a lot of preachy bits on societal sub-cultures, but not as well done. The story is frormed around a very thin treasure-hunt plot with endless "cut-scenes". It wasn't a bad novel -- in fact, it is wholly recognizable as something Ellis might write... but maybe too much ...more

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

01/12/09

Miami University Libraries rated it:

(review of isbn 0061252050)

bookshelves: bill, thriller

Read in January, 2009

"Crooked Little Vein" is a darkly satirical, wildly explicit, barely serious crime novel that I found to be ridiculously humorous in places – and I am no big fan of humorous novels . The plot is straightforward enough, and there is an attempt, all too obvious, to summarize the politics and issues of contemporary America. But really, the novel works best as a genre-influenced joyride. Warren Ellis' style is not entirely unlike Andrew Vachss mixed with Mark Twain's wit and William Gi...more

Like this review? yes

1 comment

06/08/09

AJ rated it:

(review of isbn 0061252050)

Read in May, 2009

I had tossed this in my desk at work and didn't think much of it until Jen posted a quicky update that "Everyone must go out and read "Crooked Little Vein" by Warren Ellis. Once you are out of therapy, you will thank PJ and me for bringing this most amazing novel into your lives."

How can you not want to read a book with that recommendation? OK, maybe you could not want to read it, but it made me hop on board.

It was quick read (about 3 hours for me). ...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

04/27/09

Anne rated it:

Read in April, 2009

This book would be fluff if it wasn't so dirty, but I enjoyed it. It was a quick, fun read which reached for significance at times but never quite achieved it. In keeping with its neo-noir style, you never really like any of the characters, and there really aren't any good guys to root for. Like American Gods, from which it is largely derivative, it doesn't give you much of a sense of where the plot is going until it gets there. Its portrayal of the extremes of "conservative" and "...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

04/26/09

Ceridwen rated it:

bookshelves: america-and-environs, fiction, mystery, pulp

Read in April, 2009

So, sometimes you read poetry, and the poet does surprising things with language. They use nouns, verbs, and direct objects, in something approximating their natural occurrences, but it's entirely unexpected. Leaves of grass holy crap! the wine-dark sea perfection! petals on a wet, black bough how the hell did he just do that to my brain!

In Jagged Little Vein, Warren Ellis kind of does this, only with the American landscape, and the kind of perversity most people troll the Internet ...more So, sometimes you read poetry, and the poet does surprising things with language. They use nouns, verbs, and direct objects, in something approximating their natural occurrences, but it's entirely unexpected. Leaves of grass holy crap! the wine-dark sea perfection! petals on a wet, black bough how the hell did he just do that to my brain!

In Jagged Little Vein, Warren Ellis kind of does this, only with the American landscape, and the kind of perversity most people troll the Internet hoping to find. In his America, there are towns called Columbus, Ohio and Las Vegas, NV, there's a president and his chief of staff, cars, strip malls and Walmart. 9/11 happened on September 11, and the normal laws of physics and gravity apply. However, (and this is a big “however,” not my usual bs “however”) everything else is a big, fat, insane, sordid exploration of the American subconscious.

I'm an American, right? (That's not wholly rhetorical.) I'm kind of fascinated by non-Americans musing about this specific, local, continental insanity that is my bone and fiber, my national identity. You can look in the mirror all you want, but you can't see yourself dipping your eyes when you lie. So, here, in this book, the man holding the mirror has been doing ether, ripping up tabs of tabs of LSD and covering his corneas with them, and shooting guns into the desert sky, Hunter S Thompson style.

Nothing that happens is remotely likely or possible, but it has a a strange kind of reality about it, like a velvet Elvis. Our protagonist, a sort of Spider Jerusalem-lite misanthrope PI, gets hired by the President's chief of staff, a functioning heroin addict who shits out hotel rooms for fun, to find the secret Constitution of the US of A, which has magical powers and can make anyone who reads it return to the the founding father's peculiar morality of slave ownership, high minded ideals, and missionary-position sex. I just wrote that sentence, and I have a hard time believing myself.

The book has passed from hand to hand, from one incredibly sick fuck to the next, and Spider Mike (or whatever his name is) goes from town to town looking for the book. He squabbles with his unlikely, newly minted girlfriend, whom he picked up on the streets of New York, while she was musing about Native Americans. (It always starts with First Peoples with this type of thing. Angela Carter, in Saints and Strangers, her British-style musings on America, writes some spectacularly weird stuff on the subject of Americans and the first Americans. Whatever, I digress.)

I had an incredibly good time in the two hours it took to read it, but if it had gone on much longer, I would have woken up and figured out how totally crazy it was. The girl isn't completely cardboard Barbie, but she's unlikely enough, sexy/perverse enough, to slightly rankle me. Why do the hot chicks always sleep with the tool-protagonist? Here's a description of the hero's body, from another character: "Last time I saw a body like yours it was hanging from a tree on CSI." Yeah, I'd hit that.

The ending ties up too nicely, the individual episodes read like an Afterschool Special written by Dan Savage, and I'm pretty sure no American can use the words “fuckwit” or “knob” with the confidence of the British, revealing the author as a non-Yank. But there's a kind of poetry in the insanity (I don't necessary mean good poetry) that is surprising and unusual, and puts all the verbs where the nouns should be. (less)

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

1 comment

11/26/08

Susanne rated it:

Read in November, 2008

recommended to Susanne by: t'internets
recommends it for: i don't know, people who like this sorta thing?

Man I'm so disappointed with this book. It starts off wonderfully, dare I say, Hammett-y - I can never resist a washed-out, bitingly cynical detective, especially one that does daily battle with a rat.

We meet Mike McGill when his latest client shows up and gives him an awesome case (find the *real* constitution of the USA) and an awesome expense account, and Mike McGill's off into what would be an adventure, if Ellis hadn't chosen to then turn the book into a collection of "wei...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

06/25/09

L rated it:

bookshelves: mystery

Read in June, 2009

"I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug." If you opened a book with such a great first sentence, could leave it at that bookstore? I think not. The novel is very visual. Turns out that Ellis is a renowned graphic novelist. The pictures here are all painted with words, and painted very well.

Ellis gives us our hero, Michael McGill, a "shit magnet" PI. Poor McGill--he is the picture in the dictionary over "if it weren't for bad luck, I'd...more

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

2 comments

04/19/08

J.d. rated it:

recommends it for: the truly twisted.

It's a deeply twisted, perverse,and darkly satirical take on the P.I. novel, in which a broken down private eye gets hired by the President's evil Chief of Staff to find the real, secret U.S. Constitution, which also apparently has the power to control men's minds. The book itself is pretty mind-bending, but it's going to really squick some people. Hint: if you can make it past the first sentence, you'll probably be okay. I for one, loved it.

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

04/01/09

Trin rated it:

bookshelves: english-lit, mystery

Read in April, 2009

Warren Ellis’ first novel is kind of sketchy and underwritten, with its characters careening around the country from one piece of American Grotesque to another. Mike and Trix are likeable, if somewhat thinly presented—two lines of dialogue from Trix about why she likes Mike are probably the closest the narrative comes to conveying why we should root for the guy. In a more perfect world, Ellis would have spent less time on all the gross shit our heroes encounter (and there is a lot of gross s...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

06/16/09

Andrew rated it:

Read in June, 2009

Probably the worst book I have ever read.

Written purely for shock, Warren Ellis (first time as a novelist here instead of his usual role of comic book and graphic novel writer) has weaved a tale that covers the spectrum of all things disgusting and wrong sexually in the modern United States. Normally, authors like Chuck Palahniuk and Will Christopher Baer can comment on the country in such a way because they themselves are American, but when someone from England comments on the coun...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

04/19/09

Jenni (Pony) Clark rated it:

bookshelves: really-weird-stuff

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in April, 2009

recommended to Jenni (Pony) by: Kurt Hassler
recommends it for: Warren Ellis fans, people with VERY weird senses of humor

Oh, Warren Ellis. If you aren't familiar with his works, you a) have lost friend points and b) need to be! He is a comic book God (and a generally hillarious guy- ask me about meeting him at the Heroescon one year).

Kurt bought Crooked Little Vein the day it came out and read it immediately. He then terrified me by telling me the book included Godzilla Bukkake. Yeah... Anyway, I finally got down to reading it. And it is outrageous and sensationalist and batshit crazy. But that's Warre...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment