Warren Ellis' debut non-graphic novel Crooked Little Vein' invites your cinematic brain to create the illustrations. Widely known for his comic graphic novels like Transmetropolitan where Spider Jerusalem tells the twisted news about a corporate controlled future, to a world peopled by deviant superheroes in The Authority, Warren Ellis finds an even lower rung of society to write about.

The Founding Fathers wrote two Constitutions. One filled with noble sentiments and lofty ideals that the people would look up to and emulate. The other, a "Secret Constitution" to be unveiled if America descended into a crisis of perversity. A backup document that would drag the people up from degradation to a new level of civility and honor. Rumor has it the book is bound in alien skin and has the power to change the perceptions of anyone who reads it. The government wants to use its power to effect a positive reversal of the downhill slide America is suffering and make the country clean, noble and strong again.

It is up to self-proclaimed * magnet Private Investigator Mike McGill to locate it. The government doesn't know where the document is, only that after it vanished fifty years ago it has been traded for depraved favors all across America.

McGill must grease his way through the psychosexual cesspool hidden under an illusion of normalcy. The heroin addicted Presidential Chief of Staff gives him a half-million dollar expense account and an ultra-modern pocket computer programmed with all the government's knowledge concerning the document. McGill accepts the help of an unlikely guide named Trix who is working on her thesis about deviant sexual activity in the United States. Along the way they encounter groups like the National Union of Lizard Lovers; Charles Mason obsessed cabbies, and testicular saline addicts. It isn't easy, it isn't clean, and the experience changes their opinion of an America they thought they knew, each in their own way.

Whenever Warren Ellis opens his warped mind internationally acclaimed graphic novels are born. He has written many television and video game scripts. Like Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson he flips society over and shows us the ironic and nasty side we often prefer not to think about.

Crooked Little Vein' is vulgar and hilarious, twisted and profound in its portrayal of the worst parts of humanity. It is Warren Ellis shining like a puddle of oil on the garage floor.

Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis, William Morrow, 2007, 277 pages.

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