Faint-hearts and the offendable might just want to sit this one out…the book, mind you, not this review. Acclaimed comics writer Warren Ellis cranks up the “ick” factor to about 11 and delivers a hysterical noir, mystery travelogue through the oddest, most depraved nooks and crannies of the American psyche. It is dark, twisted and no-holds barred...and it is also very, VERY funny.

To give you a sample of the agenda items Ellis uses in his carnival of oddballities, you will will find:

**A group o 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 roul More...

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?

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 could only sp More...

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.

(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 More...

I found out about A Crooked Little Vain in my Library's Book Club and loved it so much I just had to buy it. Warren Ellis does a fine job in this fast reading book. I am a fan of the old "hard boiled detective" novels of the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and of these types of Film - Noir. In Crooked Little Vain you see a hint of these down on their luck detectives in Michael McGill PI.

This book can also offend the sensitivities of many in these politically correct times. Crooked More...

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

Crooked Little Vein is without a doubt the weirdest book I've ever read, and easily among the most fun (and disturbing). The back cover, filled with reviews from other authors, is enough to dare anyone to read it: "I think this book ate my soul", confessed Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer series creator), and William Gibson, author of Spooked Country gave more of a plea than a review: "Stop it. You're frightening me."
What makes Crooked Little Vein so odd is that it centers around normalized More...

Well, this is just all kinds of messed up…..

Mike McGill is a private detective with bizarre luck that has him constantly getting mixed up in things he’d rather not know about like guys who have sex with ostriches. The creepy and corrupt White House chief of staff wants to use Mike’s tendency to be a ‘shit magnet’ to help him track down a book that contains the Secret Constitution of the United States that the administration will use to stop all the weirdness that has been going on since Nixon ga 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 fi 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 i More...

My review: This is a fun and insane book, a tourist guide through 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 s More...

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...

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 so.
-m
More...

Non aspettatevi Transmetropolitan e nemmeno Authority. Non aspettatevi Doom 2099, per Dio. Questo non è un libro per mammolette, ve lo dico forte e chiaro. Se siete minimamente sensibili al turpiloquio, lasciate perdere, non sfogliate nemmeno la prima pagina. Se invece siete in cerca di delirio sessuale, un linguaggio degno del peggior Tarantino strafatto di crack e tonnellate di sana (sanissima) ultraviolenza vecchio stile, mettete mano al portafogli e acchiappatevi questo capolavoro.
Mike McGi More...

A differenza del mio amico nero (http://nero.noblogs.org/post/2009/12/...) non riesco a definire Con tanta benzina in vena come noir. E' un libro di viaggio, questo di Ellis, un meraviglioso, eccitante, fantasmagorico, crudo, vero, romanzo di viaggio. Di viaggio nel senso della quest, della ricerca, anche dell'iniziazione, senza però l'eroismo macho e fascistoide del fantasy, anzi.
Mike McGill, detective con le ore contate - nel senso che è in condizioni tali che le sue speranze di sopravvivenza, More...

L'investigatore privato Michael McGill, ex Pinkerton e ora freelancer fallito, accetta di ritrovare la Costituzione degli USA per conto del cocainomane estremo che, non si sa come, è finito a capo dello staff della Casa Bianca. Non la costituzione che tutti conoscono, ma una sua versione alternativa, magica e segreta che Jefferson e gli altri avevano lasciato a protezione della fibra morale del paese: una fibra che – guarda caso – si è indebolita progressivamente proprio da quando Nixon ha cedut More...

"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 Gibson’s technol More...

This book was so incredibly disappointing, particularly after reading Ellis' genial Transmetropolitan series. Crooked Little Vein is like a trainwreck, and not in a good way.

In a nutshell, the story focuses on a bitter and angry private investigator who is learning about weird kinky fetishes from the internet for the first time. He embarks through a perverse journey with his "quirky" sex-fiend assistant/girlfriend to find a magical book that's supposedly the alternate Constitution of the United More...

While I generally enjoy Warren's stuff, I am also quite aware that he is a bit of a one trick pony: basically he writes pulp fiction, but then dumps a truckload of crazy, perverse, vaguely political and oh-so shocking stuff he found on the internet on top of it, in the hopes that no one will notice he is writing 'just' pulp fiction and he can keep his reputation as an edgy, grumpy old bastard.

One of Warren's many slightly noble, world weary, only sane man in a crazy world characters is hired by More...

Michael McGill is a private investigator. He is also one of the people the world seems to enjoy taking a dump on; in the course of his not so stellar career pretty much every case he has taken has turned out to be a disaster - the last adultery case he took, turned out the husband wasn't seeing another woman, but he was sneaking into ostrich farms at night to engage in tantric sex with the ostriches; you can't ever unsee that shit. So when the White House Chief of Staff (a monstrous, heroin-addi More...

My love for Warren Ellis stems all the way back to his time writing "The Authority," a comic title that changed the way I thought. His work on titles like "Transmetropolitan" and "Planetary" showed him to be a visionary voice in the medium, one he's walked away from in recent years. While fanboys/girls might weep at his departure from comics, it's books like this that demonstrate exactly why Ellis is an author so beloved.

Upon simply analysis, "Crooked Little Vein" may seem nothing more than a st More...

To be honest, I finished this book yesterday but I was not quite sure how I felt about it. First of all, Crooked Little Vein is extremely well-written and keeps you engaged throughout. Second, there is a lot of sly and interesting commentary about modern society which certainly rings true. Third, parts of the book are pretty funny. However, there are many thing I did not like about Mr. Ellis' prose debut. The book is repetitive, literally saying the same thing over and over again. The text goes More...

A great man (Bruce Willis in The Last Boy Scout) once noted that "all private detectives are scumbags," but part of the reason for that is that the best private detectives are so consistently down-and-out. Crooked Little Vein protagonist Michael McGill definitely fits into that mold, but in his it's made even worse by the fact that he not only has bad luck, he has extremely weird, sometimes nauseating bad luck. One example that crops up several times to illustrate this point is a previous case t More...

I wanted to like this book. I really wanted to like this book. Warren Ellis has been one of my favorite comic book writers for a long time. This book is a little like one of his comic books. Except it doesn't have any pictures. When the most normal character McGill encounters is a Julian Assange clone who funds his version of WikiLeaks by streaming videos (some with Japanese girls with electric eels) on the Internet you kind of know you are in for a trip down the weird.

The book isn't bad. How c More...

Absoluter Abfall

Habe mich seinerzeit von einem absolut unangebrachten Jubelerguss auf die Krimi-Couch zur Anschaffung übermotivieren lassen. Vielleicht auch weil ich so einiges für bizarren Humor und surreale Szenen übrig habe. Aber diese Aneinanderreihung von Godzillawi... (Monster-Bukake) bis zu Rinderhälftenverschlingern ist weder witzig noch grotesk, auch wenn die Injektionen von heißem Salzwasser in die Hoden bis zum Anschwellen auf Tennisballgröße wohl keinen Mann unberührt werden lassen.

U More...

So, here's a few things to think about for a moment: Take a road-book like, say, "American Gods". Now, however, replace "Gods" with "Drugs and Sexual Proclivities". Now, filter this through a style inspired as much by underground comics as by Hunter S. Thompson. Add in what is actually a kinda sweet romantic story between post-gender sexual liberation on one side, and a boring guy on the other. Anyway, the barebones plot is that a down on his luck private detective is sent by the government to f More...

Crooked Little Vein is a treat for anyone already familiar with Warren Ellis' comics, especially those on the farther reaches of normalcy, like Transmetropolitan. The dialogue is witty and filled with references to pop-culture and new ideas; the narration is a glimpse inside a mind that functions in polite society, but only just. The characters are likewise vintage Ellis. With only a few lines of description, the author paints a picture as vivid as anything one could see in one of his comics.

The More...

I finished this book not sure whether I'd finished it because I felt compelled to, or because I'd enjoyed it. There's not a great deal of story here, it's mostly style and satire with a bit of narrative to hold the whole mess together. And while it's always nice to see an author be straightforward and use alternative interests and sexuality as major plot points, here the sheer number of it all started to feel a bit like throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks (which, come to thin More...