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Crooked Little Vein

A Novel

By Warren Ellis

(17)

| Hardcover | 9780060723934

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Book Description

Burned-out private detective and self-styled shit magnet Michael McGill needed a wake-up call to jump-start his dead career. What he got was a virtual cattle prod to the crotch, in the form of an impossible assignment delivered directly from the president's heroin-addict chief of staff. It seemsContinue

Burned-out private detective and self-styled shit magnet Michael McGill needed a wake-up call to jump-start his dead career. What he got was a virtual cattle prod to the crotch, in the form of an impossible assignment delivered directly from the president's heroin-addict chief of staff. It seems the Constitution of the United States has some skeletons in its closet: the Founding Fathers doubted that the document would be able to stave off human nature indefinitely, so they devised a backup Constitution to deploy at the first sign of crisis. In the government's eyes, that time is now, as America is overgrown with perverts who spend more time surfing the Web for fetish porn than they do reading a newspaper. They want to use this "Secret Constitution" to drive the country back to a time when civility, God, and mom's homemade apple pie were all that mattered.

The only problem is, no one can seem to find it . . .

So who better to track it down than a private dick who's so down-and-out that he's coming up the other side, a shamus whose only skill is stumbling into every depraved situation imaginable?

With no lead to speak of, and no knowledge of the underground world in which the Constitution has traveled, McGill embarks on a cross-country odyssey of America's darkest, dankest underbelly. Along the way, his white-bread sensibilities are treated to a smorgasbord of depravity that runs the gamut of human imagination. The filth mounts; it is clear that this isn't the kind of life, liberty, or happiness that Thomas Jefferson thought Americans would enjoy in the twenty-first century.

But what McGill learns as he closes in on the real Constitution is that freedom takes many forms, the most important of which may be the fight against the "good old days." Like Vonnegut, Orwell, and Huxley before him, Warren Ellis deftly exposes the hypocrisy of the "moral majority" by giving us a glimpse at the monstrous outcome that their overzealous policies would achieve.

Critics

  • Crooked Little Vein

    Crooked Little Vein, Warren Ellis’s dark reworking of America, mixes absurd fantasies with real horrors, though his imagery falls short of the nightmarish. Sure, ostrich fetishists are mentioned, and there’s a film screening for enthusiasts of Godzil ... (read full critics)

    raintaxi published on Fri, 3 Sep 2010

  • Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis

    By Warren Ellis. HarperCollins Canada, 288 pp, $27.95, hardcover Warren Ellis moves deftly from the pages of comics with his debut novel, Crooked Little Vein, a pulpish detective story inspired by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The high-conce ... (read full critics)

    straight published on Tue, 31 Aug 2010

2 Reviews

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  • A wonderful romp through the dark underbelly of sexuality with a nice moral at the end that we could all do well to hear. Stick with it...Ellis is building towards something surprisingly less base than it would appear.

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    Shiloh Madsen said on Oct 30, 2009 | Add your feedback

  • The same 'see how bad the world is' motif as Transmetropolitan, without most of the redeeming values (on the other hand, the Godizlla bukkake scene makes me glad it was text and not a graphic comic book).

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    pktechgirl said on Jan 17, 2008 | Add your feedback

Book Details

  • Rating:
    (17)
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  • English Books
  • Hardcover 288 Pages
  • ISBN-10: 0060723939
  • ISBN-13: 9780060723934
  • Publisher: William Morrow
  • Pub date: Jul 24, 2007
  • Dimensions: 1161 mm x 839 mm x 129 mm Just how big is that?
  • In other languages: other languages Libri Italiani
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9780060723934 Hardcover $21.95 $20.88 bn.com
-- $9.99 ebooks.com
$21.95 $19.07 The Book Depository
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