To those who know his comics work, Warren Ellis inspires extreme polarity: The people that love him really love him, and those that don’t care for him are just waiting for an opportunity to sodomize him with a baseball bat. His debut words-only novel, CROOKED LITTLE VEIN, will do little to change the opinions on either side; Ellis brings his twisted sensibilities to print with no holds barred and no illustrator to water things down.

Let’s get this out of the way: CROOKED LITTLE VEIN is sick. It’s explicit and weird on a pornographic level. If you read it in public, you’ll feel ashamed, dirty and maybe a little excited, like you’re not wearing any underwear (or for that matter, pants). It’s also one of the best things he has written.

CROOKED LITTLE VEIN is Ellis’ take on modern America, told through the eyes of a strangely jinxed detective, Michael McGill. For McGill, things don’t go wrong so much as they go weird for him, and that’s proven right off the bat. The president’s smack-addict chief of staff shows up in McGill’s office and offers him an ungodly sum of money to track down a secret Constitution, which is bound in the hide of an alien who made the poor decision to anally probe Ben Franklin.

This book, it is told, can bring America back to the “good old days” before body piercings, Internet porn and MTV ruined American culture. So McGill and his sexy alt-babe sidekick set off across America, and each stop gets exponentially weirder.

Easy as it would be for Ellis to take the all-too-easy potshots at today’s farcical America, there’s some affection in the description of this brutally phantasmagoric USA, and near the end, Ellis’ hardcore, freak-your-shit-out facade erodes just a smidge and nearly approaches sentimentality.

That said, this is an absolutely disgusting book, one that probably will manage to offend your sensibilities at least once or even a dozen times, and it might have become grueling if the book weren’t so small; it can be read in a day or two.

Written by a Brit and as far from Harry Potter as can be, CROOKED LITTLE VEIN is as American as baseball, apple pie and Ron Jeremy. As the various freaks, kleptocrats and sexual deviants who populate the book come out to play, Ellis’ point comes firmly into view: It’s the freaks that make America great, and they’re not nearly as far underground as you might think. –Ryun Patterson

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• OCEAN by Warren Ellis