If the indictments against Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick and his associates are to be believed (and out of respect for American jurisprudence we’ll keep that “if” in place for now), the worst of it isn’t that they ran a vicious, bloody dogfighting operation on Vick’s property in Virginia. It isn’t that they allegedly took pitbull puppies out, gave them one chance to prove that they were inherently mean enough to compete (ludicrous in itself, as pit bulls aren’t any meaner by nature than any other animal: it takes human beings to teach them how to kill their own kind), and then executed the puppies who wouldn’t fight. It’s not even the methods used to kill the puppies, including drowning, skull-crushing, hanging and electrocution, that are the worst.

The worst of it is that these weren’t Ozark mutant redneck trogs doing this between batches of bathtub crystal meth, but a full-fledged sports hero, one of the few black quarterbacks in NFL history and a legitimate phenomenon. It’s Michael freakin’ Vick, Number 7, idol of millions. Realistically, no one should subscribe anymore to the idea that sports figures should be role models, not while Barry Bonds continues to lug his colossal asterisk from ballpark to ballpark, but one would hope that upon hitting the big time, one could find better ways of getting one’s kicks than snuffing animals.

Perhaps we’ve finally entered the era Hunter Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut and William Burroughs were warning us about for decades, a time of High Weirdness and Bad Craziness. Star athletes get indicted for torturing animals and shooting up nightclubs. Suburban kids get tattooed like Maoris as a rite of passage - at the mall. The vice president shoots a guy in the face and the guy apologizes on TV for inconveniencing him. An entire subculture arises consisting of people who have sex dressed as cartoon squirrels. Entire evenings of prime-time network TV are devoted to ultimate fighting and worm-eating and Howie Mandel.

If it seems sometimes like America is rolling over like a rotten log, superstar comic-book writer Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, X-Men) is there to show us all the juicy bugs underneath in his debut novel, Crooked Little Vein (HarperCollins, 2007). Part detective novel, part travelogue, all freakshow, the novel is a darkly funny and deeply disturbing field trip into worlds of fetishism and extreme behavior that may or may not actually exist, but easily could.

Degenerate America

Mike McGill is a down-and-out private eye in a section of Manhattan Giuliani forgot to clean up, living out of his office since his wife left him for another woman with nipple-hair implants, his only companion a rat who refuses to die and pisses in his coffee. He is quite possibly the unluckiest man alive, guaranteed to walk into the worst scenario imaginable at every turn. He is, simply put, a shit-magnet, which is why the heroin-addict White House Chief of Staff chooses him to track down the Founding Fathers’ heretofore unknown second U.S. Constitution, the one bound in alien skin with fragments of a meteor in the spine, the one with 23 new amendments that will save America from itself:

“’The country has changed, Mike, year by year, day by day. Look at what’s on television now. Look at the magazines and newspapers. Look at what people put on the Internet. These aren’t hidden perversions, Mike. This isn’t like Dr. Sawyer and the collection of black men’s tongues he kept in that weird little house on the outskirts of town when I was twelve. This is the mainstream now, Mike. This is how life in America is. Moment by moment, our country has grown sicker. Our borders, Mike, have come to encompass the nine circles of Hell.’”

Only the book will save us, except that the book has been lost in the deep underbelly of Degenerate America, a fetish commodity passed from one wealthy eccentric to the next. And while these people can remain hidden from the government, Mike’s unholy karma draws him to them like a beacon. Given no choice but to accept, Mike’s off, stumbling blindly into an American Heart of Darkness. He desperately needs a guide, and at a meeting of Godzilla bukkake enthusiasts (you heard me), he finds one in the beautiful Trix, a sleeve-tattooed grad student writing her thesis on “extremes of self-inflicted human experience.” Mike hires her to be his Sacagawea and together they cross the country, meeting saline-injection junkies in Columbus and silicon-injection junkies in Vegas, ritual cattle mutilators in Texas and Internet porn impresarios in California. A hotel built to resemble Jesus dressed as Uncle Sam. A presidential candidate who snorts Tony Montana-sized mounds of coke through a gas mask. A cheerful serial killer who revels in his rock-star notoriety. More High Weirdness than you can shake something longer than it is wide at.

What’s Normal?

Obviously this is meant to be over-the-top, a nonstop absurdist exercise in gleeful schadenfreude and shock value. What saves it from being little more than The Aristocrats, however, is both Ellis’ obvious respect for the private-eye genre and his determination to open a dialogue about the nature of what is perverse. More than just Mike’s sidekick, Trix functions as a counterpoint to Mike’s (and the reader’s) widening perception of human behavior behind closed doors:

“’I’m saying there’s more going on in the modern psyche than can be defined by some Puritan notion of how life should be. Hell, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve done things to you that are still illegal in some states. The pace of change in the way we live isn’t limited to the number of consumer products available, Mike. Hell, look at the way porn’s changed…. It reflects what’s going on in the world. And some bad easy-listening music and ten minutes of vanilla missionary doesn’t do it for everybody.’”

Crooked Little Vein won’t do it for everybody, either. Ellis reads somewhat like a cross between Tom Robbins and Kathy Acker and shares with them the love-’em-or-hate-’em dynamic. A lot of the novel feels gratuitous, going for the easy gross-out, and certainly there’s something in it to offend everyone. But Ellis’ ultimate goal is to push the envelope, to drag the marginalia of the American id into the light to give us a good hard look at our notions of what’s “normal,” and he succeeds in crafting a very funny morality tale from the most sordid materials.

Anyway, it’s a damn sight healthier than electrocuting puppies.

John G. Nettles