And we are back! Hello, horror fans. I'm Nick Mamatas and this is my column on reading, "Please Kill Me." Once upon a time, it was published in the now-defunct webzine Fortean Bureau. The archive of that site is still online, so do check it out. As this is a horror site, I'll be shifting the focus of the column away from science fiction and toward the scary stuff, but in this inaugural edition I've decided to meet everyone halfway with a mystery.




Warren Ellis is a famed writer of comics, some of which have been great (Planetary), and some of which have been tedious exercises in wish-fulfillment and public masturbation (Transmetropolitan). His first novel, a Bukowski-cum-Chandler-cum-The da Vinci Code romp called Crooked Little Vein, combines the best of both modes.



Detective Michael McGill is a self-proclaimed "shit magnet", by which he means that he lives in an ungentrified section of the East Village but has never really gotten over being from the Midwest. For a drunk and a former Pinkerton, Mike is very easily scandalized. He doesn't even know what bukkake is, but, being a human shit magnet, he soon finds himself with a lovely, kinky moll named Trix and with a scrotum filled with a half-gallon of salt water. This is all part of a hunt for the "Secret Constitution", written and bound in meteorite and leather by the Founders in case the first one failed. Which it has.



Crooked Little Vein is much like McGill's sloshy, oversized testes. Ellis has written a great little short story here. It just happens to be sixty thousand words long. The book itself is as much a contrivance as the Secret Constitution, which is described as "a book that forces you to read it. It prepares your eye for input." The book, stuffed as it is with single-sentence chapters and a lot of white-space, all in order to earn its status as a hardcover original, is a page turner in the production sense: the slight pages are easy to flip as there is not a lot on them except for multiple punch lines to the single wind-up: Mike McGill runs into a lot of weird sex. The short chapters are placed perfectly to allow you to take a breath and keep reading, before your autonomic nervous system says "Whatev," and heads toward your soda pop, or your fly, for more engaging stimulus. br/>


There's not much mystery in this mystery: McGill and Trix follow the paper trail of the missing book from one kook to another, and most of the kooks have hung onto the receipt with the current address of the next pervert. McGill also runs into a couple of side characters - a serial killer, a Holmesian sex fiend, a dot.com porn king - all when Trix is out of the way (dialogue between two characters is easier to write) and they all say the same thing: what was once considered dirty, gross, and even evil is now the mainstream of American society.



Ellis is right as far as this goes. About a decade ago, I was asked to write an article on extreme wrestling for a small magazine. You know the stuff: barbed wire baseball bats, "log cabin" matches in which the ring is surrounded by long florescent bulbs, the famed "anus explosion" match of Japan in which the loser has a cherry bomb inserted between his butt cheeks, etc. That was 1999, I think. By 2000, the WWF (now WWE) and Mick Foley had mainstreamed extreme wrestling to the extent where A&E was running shows on the subject, hosted by Steve Allen. The magazine, which prided itself on being the pulse of the underground, ultimately passed on the work because extreme wrestling had already hit the big time. The same twatty teens who wore their ballcaps backwards and listened to Limp Bizkit were pantomiming these bloody outrages in their backyards, and then putting the result online. Parents were worried. Money was being made. It was over.



And yet, if you had asked these kids if they were mainstream, they would have denied it up and down the block. That's what Ellis misses. At every kink and turn in Crooked Little Vein, McGill meets people who insist that they are the mainstream, whether they kill women for sport or mainline monkey feces in the White House. They even all use the word "mainstream", the surest sign that Ellis has his hand up all their asses.



Mainstream deviance is all about performing deviance for a mainstream audience. That's why we sell g-strings in the mall, and that's why South Park has been running strong on basic cable for a decade. Yes, every freak and fuckup in the world is mainstream, but few of them want to admit it. The real pathos of sitting next to a man who gets himself off while wearing rubber lizard paws is that he thinks he's really out there. All his fat buddies watch Godzilla and jerk off to those tiny twins who hang out with Mothra. He, on the other hand, jerks off to big mama herself. It's all well and good, but Vanity Fair and other slick mainstream magazines covered this ground with their articles on furry fandom years ago.



Thematically, Crooked Little Vein is a mess. As a mystery, it's a non-starter. McGill goes from kook to kook, has more or less interchangeable encounters with them, and then finds the book and makes sure the press knows about it in order to neutralize its nefarious power to instill eighteenth century morality into ass-love enthusiasts. As a love story between McGill and Trix, it's barely any more interesting than any strained discussion between two college sophomores: he's a psych major, communications minor who just got a girlfriend for the first time ever and wants to marry her now-Now-NOW to prove that he's a grown-up to his divorced parents; she's a neo-pagan and the town pump who feels a bit less loathing for herself every time she fucks someone new. They fight crime!



But for all that, Crooked Little Vein is worth reading. For one, once you start, you won't stop anyway. Second, Ellis is often hysterical and always amusing. The book is essentially a rapid-fire stand-up act a la Bill Hicks on a mediocre day. That means it is approximately forty-five billion times funnier than Dave Barry, Erma Bombeck, George Carlin, and your auntie falling down a flight of steps combined. Crooked Little Vein is the reason why God founded the public library system. Check it out, and, until next time, please kill me.