Crooked Little Vein
Written by Mark Osborne
Published on 07/27/2007
Originally from Binary Culture / [the-lowdown.net]
http://www.binaryculture.net

I have not read the new Harry Potter book. This is not because I have some absurd pretention or other that keeps me from being able to enjoy them at least nominally. Rather this is because the literary establishment suffered a terrorist attack of the highest magnitude, and only a week after the entire continent transformed into a Renaissance fair in a ritual send off for their favorite pubescent wizard.

You see, Warren Ellis, the mad bastard god of comics has written a novel. That is to say, something without pictures and only words. It seems people still do this occasionally, and Ellis has seen fit to indulge himself. It also appears that the novel was at least partially motivated by an urge to destroy the mind of his literary agent by mining the underbelly of the extreme culture of America and feeding the results into the novel.

Crooked Little Vein’s protagonist, Mike McGill, is a classic down on his luck private detective with a twist; no matter what kind of case he takes, it always winds up in him being exposed to something horrific like a senior citizen committing suicide by putting his penis in a vacuum cleaner or tantric ostrich sex. Because of this reputation, he is retained by the White House’s Chief of Staff (who I read as an exhumed, evil William S Burroughs) to find a legendary book said to have the power to return America to it’s original destiny. The catch is that the book has been passed through various corners of the American underworld since Nixon traded it away during his presidency, and so Mike must drag himself through these channels to recover the item, which is not high up on his list of reasons to criss cross the country.

The prose itself and much of the dialogue is nothing spectacular to a veteran Ellis reader. To wit, the opening sentence of the novel describes a rat shitting in Mike’s coffee. For those of you keeping score at home, this is the third variety of animal to either have defecated in coffee or been accused of it in Ellis’ writing after a cow in Hellblazer and a dog in Planetary.

I think that I was perhaps unfairly expecting something more in the vein of Planetary from the novel, something with its immediate importance and the ideological gravity of Grant Morrison’s The Filth. I’m not really sure what I got instead, but I can say for sure that the novel doesn’t exist in the real world in the way that Planetary could. Everyone in the book is a Warren Ellis character and behaves appropriately, which can be incredibly entertaining but isn’t grounded in the way that Chuck Palahniuk’s prose is. There’s a layer of unreality there that could allow a reader to employ suspension of disbelief for scenes that shouldn’t require any at all.

Crooked Little Vein is not a safe or comfortable novel, and I do not mean this in the sense that people who read Danielle Steele novels would be rather taken aback by men injecting saline into their testicles. Anyone can make a punch line out of that. Instead, Ellis purports to take us on a journey that brings the weight of the deconstructionist agenda of his native medium to the a priori judgements and complacent thinking that has had us thinking that extreme body modification and fetishism (among other things) reside safely in convention halls in out of the way parts of America and thus can be safely ignored.

Ellis’ fan base have been rigorously trained and prepared for this novel by months of his sharing his research material over his blog, which has ranged from the aforementioned saline injections to penis branding to all kinds of other things you never would have contemplated the objective reality of until Ellis dropped them in your lap like a rotting fish from a cat with a species confused concept of affection.

The thing is that in this instance it’s not Ellis with the confused concept of affection, it’s the audience that likely does not understand what they’re really being shown at first. I have read Transmetropolitan. I am currently reading The Boys. I understand when I’m being shown something for shock value or as sick humor. The difference here is that Ellis was not getting a cheap thrill out of fucking with his fans (well he was, but that’s a fringe benefit) but rather testing the waters for a new thesis emerging in his work that is just now being transmitted into the culture through Crooked Little Vein, Doktor Sleepless, and his new Suicide Girls’ column.

The crux of the argument in Crooked Little Vein seems to be this; your definition of mainstream is wrong. I am sitting at my computer today with my lip pierced and a tattoo on my wrist. This is entry level, this is mainstream. There are people with horns, elf ears, and honest to God metal Mohawks out there. The normal reaction to that is to say that it’s underground, obscure. But as Ellis points out in the novel, our conception of underground and the associations we make with it pre-date the Internet, when to find these things out people had to buy things called zines, which you probably forgot existed until now if you ever knew.

All of these fetishes, modifications, and alternative lifestyles discussed in the novel I can quickly and easily call up on Google. It’s quite literally at my fingertips, which puts America in a difficult place; a cultural civil war between the evolving and emerging supraculture and the aging values and convictions that were grafted onto the American flag during the Eisenhower administration that serves as the backdrop for the plot.

Ellis isn’t exploiting that as a punch line for the novel, he’s kicking open our back door and telling us what we’ve been ignoring in the backyard for years. For most of his career Ellis has had at least one foot planted in the future, reporting to us on all the latest and strangest developments, even plotting out his intricate and prophetic vision of the near future in Transmetropolitan, but it seems that as Transmetropolitan becomes our reality a little bit more every day, Ellis has found himself a new role. The future has caught up to us. With Crooked Little Vein, Ellis has taken the role of the midwife and there isn’t an epidural strong enough to save you.