Crooked Little Vein becomes unmistakably Warren Ellis when the protagonist, detective Mike McGill, is coerced into allowing a group of gay cops to inject a bucket of saline solution into his testicles.

McGill, a fortune-fucked private dick working on Manhattan's Lower East Side, accepts a job from the President's chief of staff, a superannuated, junk-sick James Carville, who wants McGill to track down a secret, hypnotic book that will entrance the American people and snap the listing moral zeppelin back on course. What ensues is a guided tour of the darkest, dirtiest patches of the Internet's psyche splayed out over a map of America. The author hangs out at the potluck until spit roasting takes the place of roast duck and cat tranquilizers trump hot dogs, winding McGill through a series of encounters with the republic's foul aristocracy. Along the way, the surprisingly naïve detective is initiated into the ways of the underground by his assistant Trix, ethnologist of the perverse, whom he meets in a gathering of Godzilla fetishists.

McGill is a second cousin to Ellis' best-known character, Hunter S. Thompson analog Spider Jerusalem, a muckraking human drug laboratory who fought for truth in the futuristic Transmetropolitan. But Ellis himself seems to be taking up the good doctor's mantle with fringe dispatches from Second Life for Reuters, a weekly column for Suicide Girls, and a bevy of running insights, from Burst Culture to his energy potion consumption, on the many webspaces he haunts.

The "first novel from a comics writer" tag could raise any number of red flags, but Ellis keeps it nasty, brutish, and short. Crooked Little Vein's 288 pages shoot by like a graphic novel without pictures, leaving a pang for more of McGill's Philip-Marlowe-meets-Rotten.com adventures.

-Nick Parish