In the movie Pulp Fiction, there’s a rather famous scene in the latter half of the film in which Sam Jackson and John Travolta are forced to call Harvey Keitel, who plays the character of “The Wolf.” The Wolf, as it so happens, is a clean-up man; he comes to scenes of various forms of crime — passion, malicious intent, et al — to make it look like nothing ever happened. He’s a fix it man, a guy you call when you’re in a jam and need someone to save you. Live thirty minutes away? He’ll be there in ten.
It’s through a character like the Wolf that we enter into Warren Ellis’ new digital novella, “Dead Pig Collector.” Introducing us to Mr. Sun, we’re given an assassin who can be hired for the right price and who specializes in not just the killing but what comes after. Like the Wolf, Mr. Sun is a professional who carries his own special toolbox, who has his own rituals and notions of how to perform his task in the most effective way possible, and who lives very much in a world of his own. You don’t call Mr. Sun in because you want it done quickly; you call Mr. Sun in because you want the job done right.
It’s a short story, but it’s a raw and concise one. Similar to his recent novel “Gun Machine,” Ellis packs the book with morbid and unnerving imagery building off of a somewhat slow crescendo to the stories rather dark conclusion. Ellis paces the story rather evenly, so some of the more gruesome aspects of his job smack with a more uncomfortable resonance, and its all laid out in rather grim details spaced out between dialogue held by Mr. Sun and a secondary character who becomes involved with his line of work. It’s largely a character study, and it’s not necessarily an optimistic one at that.
Mr. Sun is a strange but fascinating character who does work you or I couldn’t possibly fathom doing ourselves. Dark protagonists are no strangers in Ellis’ bibliography and Mr. Sun is certainly not too different from this, but what makes Sun seemingly affable is how we’re able to see through his eyes in an indirect way. It’s a third-person narrative, but one that follows Mr. Sun very closely in how he movies through and sees the world — not ostensibly unlike how Ellis wrote the Hunter in his previous novel. And while we follow his story, Sun (for all the good that name does him) maintains existence as an aloof figure detached from a more traditional sense of reality that the average person shares. He’s better at sneaking into our world through a chameleon-like charm than we are at entering his.
It’s with this that he becomes all the more fascinating, that his story draws us in. You don’t have to like him to want read more about him, in fact you probably won’t, but it’s all very much on purpose. “‘Endearing’ or ‘admirable’ don’t enter the process,” Ellis notes towards his work with Sun’s characterization. “They are irrelevant. A character needs only to be interesting. I found Mister Sun interesting.”
Which seems the best way to describe the story overall. “Dead Pig Collector” is very interesting, and one that stays with you for some time after reading it as you question motives and methods and madness. It’s not a difficult read in the traditional sense but it’s certainly on par with some of Ellis’ best, and it certainly stands as deft proof as to why Ellis is considered a master of the craft (albeit, for the most part, in a different form of written medium).
To get to a place of where he could write about Sun and his work, it wasn’t as heavy on research as you’d imagine. “It was just an evening’s reading on the internet, to make sure I had the process generally correct and all straight in my head,” Ellis said. “You’d be surprised at how many people discuss such things in the open. Or perhaps you wouldn’t.”
But that doesn’t make the research any less important to the story. “Research is the creative process — it’s for honing and improving the original idea, and for enriching it, and for suggesting new tangents and pathways that hadn’t previously occurred.”
Continued belowThe general nature of the story — following Mr. Sun throughout a day in the life — bodes well to length and style of the short. “It depends entirely on the idea. Not every idea is a novel.” And it’s very true for “Dead Pig Collector” — it’s certainly a sharp idea, and one that makes for a very entertaining afternoon read, but the shorter nature of the piece allows Ellis to pack more of a wallop in. It’s akin to a one-shot comic book, where the creative team offers up a concise trip into a singular world where everything you know is presented within the shorter length. It’s perhaps a touch misinformed to overly compare a novella of this kind to a comic, but given Ellis’ relationships to both mediums it’s not completely out of place — and it helps to note that the shorter approach works quite well.
See, the biggest criticism I had towards “Gun Machine” in a previous review is that it wasn’t detailed enough. I read prose to see the writer take the opportunity to paint a picture in my mind, and for the most part “Gun Machine” didn’t do that for me. So much of it relied on the dialogue between characters that it seemed at times that Ellis had skimped on some of the more pertinent or even irrelevant details, relying instead on the reader to make a few jumps in logic towards what action was playing out. Whether it was just how characters were reacting to each other or on occasion bigger moments of what a character was literally doing, the book leaned heavily on the verbage of the interactions.
Yet with “Dead Pig Collector,” that issue is improved upon. More time is taken to involve the reader in the world, its setting and how Mr. Sun moves through it. “[I’ve been] learning how to suggest an image in the reader’s mind rather than detailing it for an artist,” Ellis said, and it shows. It’s a much more focused piece, and as such Ellis is able to use writing skills developed on one book to really sell this story via its shorter nature.
“The pros are great,” Ellis continues, in discussing how his transition from primarily a comics writer to more prose has developed. “For one example, I don’t have to think in 28-word dialogue blocks!”
So with the one-and-done comic idea in mind as well as the involvement of the reader’s brain as the story’s artist (in a fashion), what makes “Dead Pig Collector” really fascinating is how the book finds its home. This isn’t a book you’ll find in a curated anthology or anywhere in print. Rather, “Dead Pig Collector” is released through Macmillan Publisher’s Farrar Straus Giroux publishing house, as part of their FSG Originals e-book line.
“There’s nowhere else to run a 10,000 word short story,” Ellis said of writing the novella. “I knew this would be an ebook single from the top, because I knew there was no other way it would get out into the world. I think the digital single may become very important in allowing certain kinds of work to survive and thrive in ways they didn’t pre-internet.”
And the statement rings true — when reading “Dead Pig Collector,” it’s tough to imagine it belonging anywhere else. The book could belong in a form of print, but in terms of how we consume the story it makes a lot of sense for a short and sweet prose piece such as this to simply be available through a more modern distribution method – iPad, Kindle, Nook, etc.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that “Dead Pig Collector” being released in such a fashion only behooves the piece overall. It’s not something you’d necessarily want to find smashed in between other short stories of its kind; having a digital single like this allows the piece to stand-out by a different set of merits, one that it sets and stands by alone, and one that makes it more interesting to read. There’s a strange sense of breathing room attached to it that the digital offers, even if accidentally, and while Ellis’ general bibliography and upcoming non-fiction novel has long offered up ideas about technology, a story of this kind released digitally — well, it just fits right in.
Continued belowThe thoughts on digitalization don’t end there, mind you. One of the things snuck into the short is that Mr. Sun is hired through a form of Snap Chat, a social media app that allows people to talk via picture messages that are quickly deleted. Mr. Sun uses this to learn about and respond to clients hiring him, which is a much darker iteration than what Snap Chat is typically known for in its use (mostly inappropriate and general NSFW stuff), and in a rather somber way it’s actually quite funny.
Ellis is certainly not shy on various forms of social media, from Twitter to tumblr and beyond, so its interesting to see him use the app in the narrative in such a fashion. “At the time I wrote that, there was already a highly secure Snapchat-like service in the world,” Ellis notes, in regards to whether or not using a tool of this kind could conceivably be warped to Mr. Sun’s purpose. “We’re already there.
“Ephemeral communications are going to be in the conversation for the next several months, as they have been for the last several months. We’re heading into a little shift in the way we view our internet usage.”
One last and slightly humorous notion about the short is that, at least for me, it somewhat reads like a short film. Obviously Ellis’ work is finding its way in the world of Hollywood, with RED 2 in theaters now and “Gun Machine” in development for a TV series. “Dead Pig Collector” even opens as Mr. Sun lands in LAX, as his latest job has taken him into Hollywood’s backyard.
So it’s easy to put actors into the scenes and watch it all through the movie theater of your mind. Ellis’ writing has always been on the verge of cinematic, especially in some of his more grandiose comics, and the transition would seem pretty seamless as such.
But the connection isn’t intentional. “Entirely accidental. You could say that about most short stories, due to similarities in structure and limited settings.”
Still – I wouldn’t be surprised to see “Dead Pig Collector” ends up adapted as a short by some aspiring filmmaker or perhaps a grad student working on a final project. It’d certainly work well.
What “Dead Pig Collector” ultimately amounts to is a strong entry into Ellis’ prose offerings. A long ways away from “Crooked Little Vein” and an approvement on the craft Ellis displayed in “Gun Machine,” “Dead Pig Collector” is a short but engaging novella that shows off a different array of tools that Ellis has available to him. Like Mr. Sun, Ellis shows that he’s sharp enough to get in, do the appropriate damage and clean it all up as if he was never there – and just like Mr. Sun gets his work through word of mouth and social media, you’ll find it rather easy to pass this story on to others for a trip into Ellis’ darkplace.
“Dead Pig Collector” is available now through FSG Originals for $0.99.
