Of fear, loathing, & stunning large animals
By Warren Ellis – Okay, so I get to write about what I like and what influenced me then and now. Fair enough. Shut up at the back there.
I’m attracted, in my reading, to use of language and interesting ideas. Nobody uses language quite like Hunter S. Thompson—like an iron bar on your kidneys and dangly bits, hitting you until you either give in or pee blood for the rest of your days. He’s a journalist, though he behaves more like some violently hallucinating idiot savant slumped in a gutter, and his was the first journalism I ever enjoyed just for its writing. Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail ’72, originally written as reports for Rolling Stone, not only makes politics interesting for even the most unpolitical reader, but funny as hell too. Also seek out the blistering Hell’s Angels, the first honest book written about bikers, and the collections of his shorter pieces. The Great Shark Hunt is probably the best place to start, and Better Than Sex will educate those who saw Oliver Stone’s Nixon as to what a criminal, disgusting, and genetically wrong piece of flesh Richard Nixon really was. Or you could try the only piece of admitted fiction Thompson’s written, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Learn exactly how many drugs you need to take to see the American Dream clearly. (Lots.)
It seems that the older I get, the only ideas that really grab my interest are the strange and horrible ones. In this regard, I must recommend The Fifty Greatest Conspiracies Of All Time, by Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen, a read that explains itself and is by turns very funny and very scary. Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco (who also wrote The Name Of The Rose, filmed with Sean Connery but not his wig) is crack-full of mad ideas, highly entertaining, and a big enough book to stun large animals with. Which can be very important.
Finally—and before I bore you to absolute bloody tears—I want to mention some novels I’ve only recently discovered. These are the best crime books I’ve read since James Ellroy (whose Black Dahlia is essential, and whose recent American Tabloid was brilliantly corrupt and horrible, by the way). I’m talking about the Factory series of novels by Derek Raymond. These five novels follow the cases of a detective-sergeant (who remains nameless throughout) who works almost alone at an obscure branch of the London Metropolitan Police called A.13—Unexplained Deaths. These books are what Thomas Harris’ clever and popular—but mild and weedy—Red Dragon and Silence Of The Lambs should have been. The books are incredibly, ingeniously horrific and startlingly bleak at times, but the horrors are counterpointed by the detective-sergeant himself—a lonely, intelligent, damaged, and very human man. His presence is the promise of some kind of justice. Starting with the first in the series, The Devil’s Home On Leave (which opens with the discovery of the butchered and boiled remains of a man left in five carefully arranged shopping bags by the river), I was instantly addicted, and obtained the rest quickly by hunting and menaces. He Died With His Eyes Open, How The Dead Live, the stunning I Was Dora Suarez, and the final Dead Man Upright—after which Derek Raymond had the cheek to go and die himself, allegedly of the drink. Mind you, if I’d imagined books like these, I might consider dying of drink too…
I’m currently writing Excalibur for Marvel. In June I start my run on Image’s Stormwatch; the first part of my serial “Atmospherics” appears in Caliber’s Calibrations #1; and in July I’ll be writing Caliber One-Shot: The Sussex Vampire, a loose adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes tale by Arthur Conan Doyle.
