A broke, burned out private investigator is hired by the skeletal, heroin-addicted Chief of Staff of the President of the United States to find an invaluable lost book. Written on the skin of an alien that was punched to death by Benjamin Franklin, the book--sort of an addendum to the Constitution of the United States--has the magical power to reset the minds of depraved viewers to some version of old-fashioned morality. Our hero tracks the book through a series of increasingly depraved, bizarre encounters.

Crooked Little Vein gets off to a seriously weird, off-putting start, as the Presidential Chief of Staff goes off on a disturbingly long poetic reverie about the wonders of shitting all over hotel rooms while heroined up. It gets less off-putting (or maybe my brain just got numb) but it does not get any less weird. The whole book exists just so Ellis can string together the freakiest things he'd discovered while doing "research" on the internet. Macroherpetophilia. Testicular saline infusion. Tantric ostrich daterape cults. Roulette parties. [shudder]

It was hard to put down, in a most-demented-part-of-a-Garth-Ennis-title kind of way. I'm a little surprised that I finished it, but I'm glad I did.