Between The Staples

The first published novel by Warren Ellis. The story of Crooked Little Vein is about a private eye, Mike McGill, who is hired to find the “Secret Constitution”. Ellis takes you through the various posts that have been on his various websites and forums all compiled in this tale. Does it work? Well…

Before I get too into this review I do want to say: Warren Ellis can write. He writes a good deal of comics a month plus he put out a novel. Warren Ellis has built a very popular fandom and claimed the title “Internet Jesus” numerous times. He writes all the time and is very popular in the comic book industry and amongst the fans. That all said, I am personally done with Warren Ellis and here is why:

Crooked Little Vein is his first published book. Sadly the book is nothing more than all the posts on his various websites put into one book. Not much that he mentioned is not something I personally have heard of or seen (on his website or just in general) in the last while. His main character is an assh**le with a strange female sidekick. The main character goes through the book as a cursing, foul man who never fails. Find one of his comics and compare. These are Warren Ellis template characters.

Warren Ellis copy & pasted so many quibs he has used in various book that is made it impossible to really know the story and characters. They are an amalgamation of a ton of stories Warren has already written or has noted on his website and mixed with his own anger and hatred bleeding through the pages. The miserable, hatred, anger that Warren Ellis writes with is what bothered me in this book and generally with his writig these days.

At one point in the book, the client for the private eye says:

“You don’t enjoy your work, Mike. It is very sad.”

This book made it more clear than every before that Warren Ellis does not enjoy writing what he does. He does not enjoy writing comics and that is very evident recently in a good deal of work he is doing (see Black Summer or Marvel’s Thunderbolts) and the same can be said about this book. When Warren Ellis does pull off great writing it shows in the works of Transmetropolitan, The Authority, Fell, Desolation Jones and recently with Doktor Sleepless but often this is not the case and you can taste it. Taste it just like the rat piss in his characters coffees that Warren Ellis likes to rehash.

I want to read Warren Ellis work and enjoy it. I do not want to read it and know he just hates doing what he is doing - this is not enjoyable. I do not visit his website often nor am I on his Bad Signal email list. I do not want to read about how his eyeballs bleed or such. Yes, people are miserable yet they pick themselves up and get on with their lives. I guess I am not interested in the reality TV that is Warren Ellis. I want to read good stories and perhaps with the dawn of the ‘net, we all spend too much time reading into the minds of our writers and their daily bullshit.

Crooked Little Vein will appeal to those who know nothing of Warren Ellis. I can imagine someone who never read any of Warren Ellis’s work saying, “Bloody mad but brilliant!” after reading it. The book does have some of the Warren Ellis moments I enjoy, like the response to shooting saline into one’s testicles, but not enough to make the cost worthwhile for me.

Thanks for the ride but for me, I am done with Warren Ellis.

More on Crooked Little Vein here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooked_Little_Vein

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.