Why You'll Love This
Warren Ellis calls this a love story — and he's not entirely wrong, which is the most unsettling part.
- Great if you want: dark, precise crime fiction with a genuinely unusual protagonist
- The experience: razor-sharp and over in a flash — reads like a perfect short film
- The writing: Ellis writes cold competence with a black humor undercurrent — clinical, then suddenly vivid
- Skip if: 29 pages feels too brief to justify the investment
About This Book
In Los Angeles, a professional killer named Mister Sun operates with the calm precision of a man who treats death as logistics. Warren Ellis calls this a love story, and he means it — though the love in question is for craft, for process, for the quiet satisfaction of a job done without loose ends. When a dangerously stupid client threatens to unravel everything Mister Sun has built, the stakes become surprisingly intimate. This is a story about competence under pressure, and about what happens when the careful world a careful person has constructed starts to crack.
At under thirty pages, Dead Pig Collector earns every word. Ellis writes in a register that's cool and precise without ever feeling cold — there's dark humor threaded through the efficiency, and genuine menace beneath the deadpan surface. The brevity is the point: this is fiction stripped to its load-bearing walls, where every sentence either advances character or dread. It reads like a perfectly thrown punch, short and specific and harder than you expected. For anyone who wants crime fiction that trusts its reader completely, this delivers.