When I left for Iceland in December for the winter holidays I needed something to read on the plain ride back home. I chose Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. I have always been a fan of Warren Ellis’ work both in books and comics and have tried to read most of what he has written. Crooked Little Vein tells the tale of the run down detective Mike McGill and how he is commissioned by the US government to find and retrieve “The Secret Constitution of the United States”. This constitution has been lost for years but is believed to have the power to give the person who reads it power of control over his listeners. The government says they want to use it to restore probity and decency to America which has fallen pray to Sodomy, perversion and indecency over the last 50 years. The book tells of the detective’s journey through the US where he chases the location of the book between the worst perverted collectors the country has to offer.

This book is contains some seriously crazy stuff. The perversions that are identified and described in the book are incredibly outrageous but according to Ellis himself all real and he has been witness to all of them. The most insane one was a scene where detective McGill bears witness to a Godzilla Bukkake…. (note that if you Google it, that bukkake is NOT SAFE FOR WORK). This book is a great thriller and will keep you reading non stop (unless you’re are offended by it’s content). I read the whole thing in my flight and managed to finish it in less then two and a half hours so it’s a short read but definitely worth it.

Here is what Ellis had to say about the book in a interview a few months back:

“This all started when I inherited a literary agent upon signing with the Writers And Artists agency in LA for film and tv work, years ago. Unbeknownst to me, W&A had a lit agency in New York, and one day Lydia Wills phoned me up to tell me that, now I was with W&A, she was my lit agent, and when was I going to write her a novel to sell? This went on for months. I nearly had her legs broken twice. Until, one day, I thought to myself, let’s just shut her up. And I sat down and wrote the first ten thousand words of an utterly unsaleable novel. I figured I could recycle the material into comics later. So I handed her this horror of a thing, complete with Godzilla Bukkake scene, and said, take this and leave me alone.

Thinking, obviously, that she’d decide I was insane and never bug me again.

Two weeks later, she phoned to tell me she’d sold it to Harper Collins in New York.

It’s one of the more epic backfires of my career, Chris.”

You can even read the first chapter from Amazon.com if you are interested

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