Tapping a Crooked Vein

British writer Warren Ellis is what you might’ve gotten if Hunter S. Thompson had ground up Philip K. Dick’s brain and snorted it off the tattooed flank of a callipygian Suicide Girl. His debut novel, Crooked Little Vein, is a breakneck tour of America’s tumorous underbelly, 280 pages of furious freight-train satire.

With the keen eye of the irreverent outsider, Ellis goes on a crazy trip across the United States, hitting representative hot spots of American lunacy: Manhattan, Ohio, Texas, Vegas, L.A. He brings out a parade of sickos and psychos so acutely bizarre (the least of them is a clique of gay bodybuilders who enlarge their testicles with saline injections … to kill an afternoon) that it threatens your suspension of disbelief—though I’d swear two-thirds of the weirdness has been documented online and linked to Ellis’ often disturbing blog.

Ellis is a well-established writer of comic books and graphic novels, and has created himself as an Internet cult figure of significant stature. His books are full of big ideas, and the ideas are never comforting. His vision of what a government-made Bionic Man would really be like is far more disturbing than Frankenstein’s monster. He has invaded the Earth with a destructive, self-replicating idea, and he’s currently writing a superhero who kills the president because, after all, who’s a bigger villain than a guy who starts barbaric multinational wars under venal pretenses? Ellis plays with genres, using his Planetary series, in particular, to honor and update pulp heroes, superheroes, Hong Kong action movies, monster islands and psychotropic physics.

What makes Ellis work is that he’s more than a literary kick in the crotch. I can’t think of anyone currently working in comics who’s done quite the same job of wearing his heart on his sleeve. He gets absolutely gushy over the romance and heroism of manned space flight. When he took superheroes seriously, he used them to build a finer world, and when he didn’t, he exploded their absurdity until you’d think the whole industry would have no choice but to throw in the towel and finally try something new. Badmouth sang his praises when we wrote about Global Frequency, a brilliant 12-issue miniseries that was also a tragically failed (and widely bootlegged) TV pilot.

As a fan, then, I was excited about the novel, but I did also worry about Ellis’ drawbacks. Sometimes the mad ideas get the best of him, tossed out half-baked and abandoned so quickly the stories hang like an unfinished sentence. You get the feeling with his lesser work that he’s spat it out merely to purge his Red Bull-addled skull. While Global Frequency handled the one-issue, one-crazy-idea pace ideally, and his hit-or-miss Apparat anthology had some great little moments, the idea of Ellis having to sustain a prose narrative—and without artists like John Cassaday or Bryan Hitch backing him—had me worried.

Crooked Little Vein does have its flaws, but they’re always entertaining, and the sheer insane momentum of the book—one of its great strengths—sweeps you past them so quickly, you hardly have time to raise an eyebrow. The premise is almost too mad to encapsulate, so it’s fortunate for me that the entire first chapter is online (.pdf). Ellis comes out snarling from page one, and goes from a sadistic uber-rat to a heroin-fiend White House chief of staff, who hires the most downtrodden private eye ever to find America’s lost Constitution. Not that rag in the National Archive, but the secret other Constitution with the magical power to change our country—in fact, it was the loss of the document 50 years ago (Nixon traded it for sexual favors) that set America on its current course of depravity, decadence and decay.

And from there, the story never lets up. You careen from the weirdest denizens of the Internet to batshit-crazy rich Republicans who make the quirky clients who’d hire Philip Marlowe seem dull and bourgeois. And he sets up a cockeyed love story whose tensions and dilemmas are, well, probably weirder than yours. But I’m only guessing. Through it all, Ellis has his eye on what’s wrong with this potentially great nation, and his gonzo satire is not aimless theatricality. At one point, his narrator, Mike, is killing time in a rented car:

Pressing buttons at random found me something that sweetly declared itself to be “Ohio’s Liberal Voice,” but what followed appeared to be nothing but a recording of someone screaming at a very high pitch for a very long time.

When Mike finds a local pirate station being run out of the garage of a couple teenagers crushingly bored with bland corporate radio, he hears their makeshift studio raided by the FCC.

“Pirate radio operations have been reclassified as Broadcast Terrorism. You’re going to be wearing dogs in your asses at Abu Ghraib for the next five years, you dirty bastards.”

“This is community radio!”

“If we wanted communities, we’d make Clear Channel pay us to run them. Put on the hoods, too. No more devil music for you, Radio bin Laden!”

I switched off the radio, miserably, wondering if it was all my fault for listening and daring to enjoy it.

That last line undercuts the outrageousness with a plaintive sadness that injects humanity into Mike’s story and Ellis’ cultural critique. The story sets Mike up with a very unusual girl, Trix, a brilliant, heavily tattooed and unusually open-minded hottie for whom our hero falls. Trix is Mike’s tour guide to America’s seedier subcultures, and as Mike struggles with his mission, the tentative flowering of romance reveal his softer side. The novel sprints across maybe a week of time, and the simple love story aspect develops fast but plausibly, at least in context of this entirely outrageous world.

One flaw of the book is that Ellis harps a little repetitively on the fact that “subculture” and “mainstream” aren’t the terms we think they are. Several times characters point out that things that shock Mike, from body modification to bestiality, are widespread on the Internet, and that makes them de facto mainstream. It’s an interesting idea, if not entirely shiny-new to the kind of people likely to enjoy this book. Mike gets the message yet again from a Web-porn entrepreneur who has scores of women in cubicles performing degrading acts of self-abuse for millions of paying subscribers:

“Think of it as exploded television. Every station has at least one show you want to see, right? Well, on my network, your favorite show is on all the time. Everyone’s favorite show is on all the time, whenever you want to watch it. Add up all the viewers on my network, and I have a bigger audience than HBO. This ain’t fringe anymore, friend. If you define the mainstream as that which most people want to watch, then I’m as mainstream as it gets.”

So if your sex life consists of consensual and largely prop-free intercourse with a single-digit number of adults of your own species, well, that’s quaint. Not that Ellis isn’t right. When Jenna Jameson is a best-selling author, porn is as mainstream as the Cub Scouts. Who probably have a merit badge in bukkake video by now. Ellis challenges Mike’s—and the reader’s—sense of “normal.” He holds up a mirror to this deeply weird 21st century and argues that it’s not the freaks on the side, but the Powers That Beat who are the real sickos, the real problem. And yet we fret about whether, say, gay couples can share health benefits, or gasp at how many places a teenage girl can pierce herself.

It’s the way Ellis effortlessly blends the moralizing notes, the comic and shocking outrages and the character development—all mixed in a blender stuck on full-tilt puree—that makes the novel work. The lost Constitution is reputedly a book engineered by strange and possibly supernatural means to be compulsive reading: Once you start it, you cannot put it down, cannot look away. Crooked Little Vein is exactly like that.

Except it wasn’t bound by Benjamin Franklin in leather made from a dead extraterrestrial. As far as I can tell.