Chapter one of Warren Ellis's CROOKED LITTLE VEIN, free

Warren Ellis has just posted chapter one of his forthcoming novel Crooked Little Vein, a gonzo hard-boiled detective story that takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the ickiest subcultures on the Internet. I loved this book — I'll be publishing a review shortly — and I'm pleased to note that we'll be having Warren on the Boing Boing Boing podcast in August to talk about it.

I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my
coffee mug. It was a huge brown bastard; had a body like a
turd with legs and beady black eyes full of secret rat
knowledge. Making a smug huffing sound, it threw itself
from the table to the floor, and scuttled back into the
hole in the wall where it had spent the last three months
planning new ways to screw me around. I'd tried nailing
wood over the gap in the wainscot, but it gnawed through it
and spat the wet pieces into my shoes. After that, I spiked
bait with warfarin, but the poison seemed to somehow cause
it to evolve and become a super-rat. I nailed it across the
eyes once with a lucky shot with the butt of my gun, but it
got up again and shat in my telephone.

I dragged myself all the way awake, lurching forward
in my office chair. The stink of rat urine steaming and
festering in my mug stabbed me into unwelcome wakefulness,
but I'd rather have had coffee. I unstuck my backside from
the sweaty leatherette of the chair, fought my way upright,
and padded stiff-legged to the bathroom adjacent to my
office. I knew that one of these days someone was going to
burst into the office unannounced to find a naked private
investigator taking a piss with the bathroom door open.
There was a time where I cared about that sort of thing.
Some time before I started living in my own office, I
think.