The debut novel from prolific British comic book writer (or “graphic novelist,” as the jacket copy calls him) Warren Ellis somehow manages to distill all the irritating, flashy quirks of his comics writing into prose form while failing to capture the brilliance built around those quirks. Crooked Little Vein is like a dumping ground for all the weird ideas Ellis has had over the years that haven’t found their way into his comics, a nonstop barrage of desperately shocking images and situations that are so over-the-top that they’re ultimately deadening. The early appearance of giant-lizard bukkake, for example, is delightfully absurd, but by the time you get to the end of this slim, brisk novel, Ellis has tried dozens of times to top that, and the party where rich and powerful men have unprotected sex with virginal teens and take bets on which one will end up with HIV barely merits a blip on the appalled outrage-o-meter.
Fans of Ellis’ comic-book work (or his blog) will instantly recognize pretty much every element of Crooked Little Vein, starting with protagonist Mike McGill, a New York City private eye who’s one part Spider Jerusalem (Transmetropolitan) and one part Richard Fell (Fell). A basically decent guy and the only character in the novel who’s not a sexual deviant, Mike is your standard hardboiled-detective-novel protagonist, all rumpled suits and ever-present cigarettes, and he narrates in a voice that’s unmistakably Ellis’. (The novel’s opening line, “I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug,” could be the first line to virtually anything Ellis has ever written.)
Mike is hired by the U.S. president’s cartoonish chief of staff (he enjoys mainlining heroin while watching fashion shows on TV and shitting in fancy hotel beds) to track down the alternate Constitution of the United States, a document bound in the skin of an alien that once probed Ben Franklin. The government believes this artifact will bring America back to its wholesome roots and put an end to all of the perversion that’s taken over the country.
With the typical Ellis protagonist comes the typical Ellis sidekick, a spunky, smart, young alterna-chick named Trix, who has plenty of tattoos and an inordinate interest in sexual perversity (she’s writing a thesis on it). Ellis clearly idolizes women like this, and they are almost always hypercompetent and emotionally mature counterparts to his train-wreck male heroes, whom they inevitably redeem (or at least tame). All of that happens here, too, although the tentative love story between Mike and Trix, while in no way believable, is at least sweet and human, and a welcome respite from the deluge of gross-out imagery.
Unlike many comics writers, Ellis makes a smooth transition to prose in terms of style, and Vein is fast-paced and easy to read. A dedicated futurist, Ellis has intriguing ideas about the development of technology, and when Vein slows down and speculates rationally on things to come, it can resemble cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson’s recent forays into present-day storytelling (not surprisingly, there’s a Gibson blurb on the book’s back cover). But Ellis can’t resist inundating his readers with descriptions of every weird little sexual subculture he’s come across or imagined, and sometimes the chapters feel more like bullet points than storytelling.
In his best comics work, Ellis is able to weave the infodump into a fascinating narrative with well-drawn characters, but Vein is little more than a perfunctory framework in which to show off Ellis’ extensive knowledge of the grotesque. Comic-book fans are already well aware of how smart and depraved Ellis is; he’d be much more successful at convincing prose readers of the same thing if he’d just stop trying so hard.
Crooked Little Vein
** 1/2
Warren Ellis
William Morrow, $21.95.