Severe, Sick, and Super
This is the first novel by graphic novelist Warren Ellis. This book was recommended to me by a patron at the library where I work, and I am thinking he and I may be the only ones reading it in the small town library in which I work. I have read a lot of shocking stuff in my reading life … but this book was a whole new sick world of underbellied delights! But unrealistic? No, uber-realistic as far as our American life and the climate of political corruption (and complete depravity in the political circle and in the realm of our richest dynasties) and manipulation that has become so much a part of that American life.
But as heavy as this all sounds … it is often very very funny. And I even experienced moments of real emotion, especially for our loveable shitmagnet protagonist, Mike McGill.
This is not a book for those who are easily offended, and Republicans may detest it and want to burn it on the steps of the local library because of its too-close-for-comfort realities of the depraved behavior of their politicos in this book and the ones in the news, especially in recent months, for their depraved behaviors.
But all this said, there is a fantastical element to the novel and that would be the sought after and invaluable book McGill is sent to retrieve for the agenda of the administration in office throughout the book (think: moral majority hullabaloo … morals of course to everyone but those in power who are often — and in this book they are — the sickest of the sick). America must be saved from itself says the administration whose mouthpiece is the cocaine-snorting Chief of Staff with a dead wrong sense of sick entitlement. And at first this is just a job to our broke shitmagnet Private Investigator, but it quickly becomes his own (and us as readers as well) moral conundrum.
The book is fascinating and fast-paced and the end, ah, the end … simply glorious!
