After finishing Wuthering Heights I stand by my previous statements about Heathcliffe and Cathy. To me this book isn’t about love but it’s about passion, and passion covers love AND hate. The two characters obviously love each other at some point, then over time start to tease each other in the most awful ways possible. They are hateful, spiteful and downright nasty.

It’s often implied that Heathcliffe is some kind of demonic creature, which adds to the gothic tones of the book. I think it’s more likely that Mr Earnshaw was playing away from home and ended up with a son he wasn’t expecting, which if true makes the relationship between Heathcliffe and Cathy even more worrying.

Going into the book I was expecting some great love story, with the main characters torn apart like Romeo and Juliet. In reality this is a bleak, dark book which turned out to be a lot more interesting than I was expecting. While the book has many classic quotes my favourite has to be the following:

Instead of finding her outside, I heard her voice within. The little monkey had crept by the skylight of one garret, along the roof, into the skylight of the other, and it was with the utmost difficulty I could coax her out again.

Just cos I love the fact that even all that time ago they used the word “monkey” in such a way. I’m easily pleased when monkeys are involved.

Wuthering Heights took me a few false starts to get into and took me a few weeks to finish off as I could only concentrate on it for so long at a time. Soon as I finished it a few days ago I picked up a new purchase to read, rather than delving into my large pile of books to-be-read as I had planned. That book is Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis.

Ellis has been one of my favourite comic writers for a few years now. his “mainstream” stuff is some of the best super-hero work out there, especially his work on Thunderbolts and Iron Man. He does a lot of work for Marvel, which probably pays his bills, and then he does a lot of stuff for Avatar which I feel is probably where we see the real Warren Ellis. And that’s what this book is like. It’s sick and depraved in the most interesting way possible.

The basic plot involves a Private Detective, Michael McGill, who is hired to find the “real” American Constitution that has been lost from the White House for 50 years. Along the way he picks up and falls in love with a girl who helps him on his journey through America’s seedy underground. Most of the people/groups that McGill meets are based on real events that Ellis has discovered on the internet over the year. These include, but are not limited to, Godzilla Bukkake fetishists, men who inject their testicles with saline solution for fun and the infamous baby Jesus butt plug. All of this shocks McGill and yet is seen as being normal to Trix, his student sidekick/lover.

Trix is an interesting character, and without going into detail reminded me far too much of an ex girlfriend. McGill’s responses to some of the things she reveals also reminded me of myself, but I’m guessing they are the kinds of things most men would say in such situations.

While the novel is obviously written to purposefully disturb (Ellis admits he wrote it expecting it to not get published, he just needed to get his agent off his back) it has a lot to say about modern life, especially since the dawn of the internet, disguised as a hard-boiled detective noir. I think a lot of it is summed up by the elderly serial killer who explains to McGill that all these “freaks” are not the underground, they are the mainstream. To me this is Ellis telling us that the internet has taken everything previously underground and made it mainstream because anyone with a computer can now access such information/images/video etc, thus none of these things are hidden any more.

It’s quite a short book, around 280 pages, and there isn’t really much to each page. Most chapters are around 4 pages long, some being only a few lines long, not even a page. But this is pure Ellis, he knows exactly how to break things up into small chunks and give you only the information you need and nothing more. Unlike Wuthering Heights this only took me a few hours over a few days to read, although it’s that compulsive that it would be easy to sit and read in one sitting.

I hope Ellis has more where this came from.

(I got the American edition of the paperback, which may or may not differ from the UK version, which includes a short interview, behind the scenes stuff and even a few cookery lessons from Ellis. I like extras like this, really adds to the value).

A while ago I started reading Wuthering Heights for no other reason than I felt I must, it being a classic and all (Ok, so the fact that it was written and is set near where I’m from might have something to do with it. And the fact that I used to visit the town the Bronte’s are from a lot as a kid with my parents). It took me a few false starts until I truly started reading it but I’m about half way through now.

It took a while to get used ot the writing style and the difference in language between now and when it was written, and even for a full blooded Yorkshireman like myself I found some of the dialect to be hard to follow. So far I’m enjoying the book a lot more than I thought I would. For years I presumed it was just another period piece, the kind of thing my mum used to read when we were on holiday about orphans working down a mine or some such hardship, but to my surprise it’s a much darker book with an underlying depth that delves into the almost supernatural.

It’s never explicitly stated (at least not so far) but Heathcliffe seems to be something not of this world, or possessed by some deeper evil. And the way the world around the characters is described is almost like something from a Hammer Horror film (and since the book pre-dates Hammer by around a hundred years I wouldn’t be surprised to find it was an influence on horror writers since it was published).

I was always under the impression this was just another love story, but the love involved is dark and almost so strong it’s turned to hatred. It’s actually reminded me of American Psycho, whereby it keeps you gripped and interested even though you hate the main characters. For many years I’ve seen people use Heathcliffe and Cathy’s love as an example of the ultimate love, yet so far I can’t help but feel I’d never want to feel about anyone how they feel about each other, they seem to have the most destructive love I’ve ever seen. Mind you, they are both such horrendous people maybe they deserve each other.

Then again, all the above opinios may change by the time I get to the end of the book.