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Loading... Crooked Little Vein: A Novel (original 2007; edition 2007)by Warren Ellis
Work InformationCrooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis (2007)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Having read some of the authors comic books I thought it was time to see how he transitioned to the novel form. It translates into a gritty, dark, crude and depraved look at the seedier side of life by way of a private detective searching for a book for the Vice-President of the United States which could help turn the tide of moral decay spreading in the country and worldwide. His search starts of with macroherpetophilia (don’t look this one up in work) and gets progressively worse with each step. For me, it was a helluva lot of fun. ( ) It's probably only a two-star book, but the aww-shucks hero made the whole thing too light and fluffy to really hate the fact it's mostly icky things that are old hat to the Internet strung together in a half-formed, Swiss-cheesed plot. It made a couple of good points, had a handful of amusing scenes, and tried too hard while not really trying hard at all. The viewpoint is engaging, drily witty and starts out as a very good humouristic noir pastiche. Unfortunately there's not much plot to speak of, just an episodic hop of the protagonist unhappily encountering one unusual (and often, but not at all always, vile and off-putting) deviant from the perceived norms of sexual behaviour after another. There is some humour in this, but for my money, much less than the author seems to think there is, and whatever minor shock value it might be going for wears of pretty quickly. The romance subplot is decently told, but rather by-the-numbers, and (spoiler alert) the resolution is a rather obvious twist combined with a convenient deus ex machina character introduced towards the end of the narrative. I had fairly high expectations to this book, and have liked what (admittedly little) I've read of Ellis' comics work, but all in all I found it to be rather forgettable. It's a shame, because a stronger plot and actual mystery at the heart would have made this a great read -- even as it stands, the narration is so well done as to keep me flipping pages despite the lack of plot momentum, and most chapters offered at least a chuckle or two. Just when you think that things can't get more depraved, frustrating, and undercutting to your faith in humanity, they do. This was a hell of a fun read, from cover to cover. I'm not quite sure if it's making fun of the detective novel form, or taking it out for a night on the town, getting it good and liquored up, and making sure that the hangover was well worth it. I really enjoyed reading this one, from cover to cover. I laughed out loud at several points, and just shook my head at others. I wonder if that fortune-telling girl on the corner will show up in any of his other works...
Ellis is a great storyteller, and this little sucker just rips along. I just finished it in 90 minutes on an airplane and it left me hungry for more.
Burned-out private dick Michael McGill needs to jump-start his career. What he gets instead is a cattle prod to the crotch. The president's heroin-addicted chief of staff wants McGill to find the Constitution--the real one the Founding Fathers secretly devised for the time of gravest crisis. And with God, civility, and Mom's homemade apple pie already dead or dying, that time is now. But McGill has a talent for stumbling into every imaginable depravity--and this case is driving him even deeper into America's darkest, dankest underbelly, toward obscenities that boggle even his mind. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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