The six stories here are all good, yet each differs greatly from the others: “The School Friend” (grammar school girlfriends reunite after years, and the old house of the returning woman suggests disturbing revelations), “Ringing the Changes” (a May-December couple in a small seaside village encounter their own mortality ... and the risen dead), “Choice of Weapons” (an extraordinarily nightmarish account of love at first sight, involving a beautiful eccentric woman, a suburban London house of Ancient Egyptian design, and what may--or may not--be a duel), “The Waiting Room” (a lonely traveler communes with the dead who lie beneath the train station floor), “The View” (a convalescent middle-aged Foreign Service Officer accompanies a Circe-like woman to an isle off the English coast), and “Bind Your Hair” (an engaged young woman visits her husband’s family in the country and encounters a bizarre country ritual). As for the characters, they are quite varied, which is definetly an advantage over countless other weird tales writers, who usually have very similiar "types" in their stories. However, I actually feel they are not nearly as developed and psychologically rich as some reviewers often suggest - they may be fairly complex within the range of weird fiction, but not so when compared to non-genre fiction of the 20 th century. The book also contains a couple of non exceptional ghost stories which are none the less well written. And a psychological haunted house story which begins the book called the "School Friend" which is more full of implications and innuendo than actual fright. The View: A beautiful, sad fable about a man who is pixilated by a magical woman in a magical house, and then lives on, literally older and sadder. There is such a powerful aura of romantic longing and desolation around this story.

A young fiancée spends her first weekend in the country with the family of her betrothed. Although she finds them all basically nice, she also senses that their life is a tad too commonplace and passive for her. There is, however, an alternative of how to spend one’s time in the country offered to her. Surprisingly devoid of any crime, Ian Rankin’s Dark Entries was strangely printed under the now defunct Vertigo Crime Imprint. Perhaps not crime-ridden in regards to the events that unfold, our beloved John Constantine is present with all his established charisms of rakism and unfiltered roguishness that could very well fit into a story of a more illegal nature. With our hero in the picture the only thing left to establish is the setting. And, weirdly enough, it’s a demented take on The Truman Show that sets the stage for this contradictory story to take place.Dark Entries was first published in 1964 and contains six curious and macabre stories of love, death and the supernatural, including the classic story ‘Ringing the Changes’. Ringing The Changes: The atmosphere of slowly building oppression and the growing sense of dread kept me on the edge of my seat. What really makes the story are the little, weird details about the characters the couple meet in the hotel, adding to a sense of reality out of joint. Slowly but unmistakably the tension of community and sodality waxed among them, as if a loose mesh of threads weaving about between the different individuals was being drawn tighter and closer, further isolating them from the rest of the world, and from Pendlebury: the party was advancing into a communal phantasmagoria, as parties should, but in Pendlebury's experience seldom did; a sombre chinoise of affectionate ease and intensified inner life." This was my personal favourite in this collection, an unusual zombie story in which a dance with the dead allows a young wife a glimpse into something that is more alive than anything her husband might offer her will ever be.

Dark Entries is one of these self-contained graphic novels featuring characters from DC comics in an alternative, more relaxed universe. Specifically, Dark Entries tells the story of how Constantine was invited to contain a situation where the haunted house on a horror reality show began to act on its own. While it is immediately given away that the gentlemen who invited Constantine had a lot more in mind than a simple exorcism, I found the plot developments that followed to be least expected and quite enjoyable. The first in the series, “Dark Entries”, was written by Ian Rankin, a popular British mystery writer best known for a series of novels featuring his detective John Rebus. Choice of weapons : A weird love/obsession story with many twists and curves. A nightmarish narrative with an abrupt ending that it will make you start over. Vertigo Crime που διαβάζω, το οποίο όμως ξεφεύγει από τα στενά όρια του αστυνομικού, μιας και πρωταγωνιστής είναι ο John Constantine, ή αλλιώς Hellblazer, ένας ντετέκτιβ παραφυσικών φαινομένων με ξεχωριστές δυνατότητες. Η αλήθεια είναι ότι παίζει να είναι η πρώτη φορά που ασχολούμαι με τον συγκεκριμένο χαρακτήρα, μιας και στο παρελθόν δεν έτυχε να διαβάσω κάποιο κόμικ με αυτόν πρωταγωνιστή και δεν έχω δει καν την ταινία με τον Keanu Reeves. Θα επανορθώσω όμως!

Her expression indicated that she was one of those people whose friendliness has a precise and never-exceeded limit. The premise as described in the blurb is that of an "occult detective" investigating strange goings-on in a Big Brother-style reality TV house. I count Ben Elton's Dead Famous as one of my favourite novels, so I was expecting something vaguely similar. I was sorely disappointed. Basically, half way through it turns out that all of the contestants are actually dead and in Hell, changing the entire genre of the book. I felt completely cheated. Last month, I described The Colorado Kid by Stephen King as "a bait and switch of a book". It promises hard-boiled crime and resoundingly doesn't deliver, but when all's said and done, it's still a crime novel. Dark Entries doesn't even end up in the same ball park as advertised. The story follows a dozen or so contestants, neither of which remembers how he/she agreed to join the show and each of which is haunted by his/her own demon. The characters are well-flushed for the book's short length, and their dialogs are generally amusing. Constantine enters the house briefly after his arrival and begins interacting with its tenants to investigate the strange happenings. The focus periodically shifts to the showrunners and viewers as well, showing a few supporting characters that also contribute to the plot. After giving it a moment of reflection here’s my final two cents: Dark Entries is a John Constantine story for fans of John Constantine. If you’re in the fan club, I’m sure you’ll dig it. If you’re not in the club, you’ll probably be bored just like I was.

Choice Of Weapons: A man falls in love with a strange, seductive girl who lives in an eerie old house. She is lost in a dream of love, and so is he. Dreamy and startling. I picture Eva Green as the girl. I really loved Ringing the Changes, The View and Bind Your Hair with The Waiting Room being the weakest. Constantine's TV is a portal to hell. That's a nifty concept, but the idea that throwing it out the window would break the spell doesn't fit -- certainly not in Constantine's story-world, in which de-demonizing objects and places (and people) is often the pretext for multi-issue story arcs. I just started re-reading the series from the start, so I'm especially sensitive to the way tiny objects linger in the storyline like houses with hidden mold carcinogen, waiting for an unsuspecting new tenant. In an actual Hellblazer storyline, that TV would end up in a Salvation Army, and its parts would then be reused by some unaware Internet start-up, which would then discover a demon is its most generous angel investor. And Constantine, at this stage, would foresee such an eventuality and work to avoid it. Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow. He is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award, and he received two Dagger Awards for the year's best short story and the Gold Dagger for Fiction. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews, and Edinburgh.

Choice of Weapons - I really liked this one, the end left me a bit at sea, the last paragraph in particular REALLY throws one for a loop. But overall I thought this was an excellent story with a very shadowy, almost "haunted house" atmosphere to it. A man becomes suddenly obsessed with a woman he sees in a restaurant, he goes after her, contending for her love with a quite sinister figure. Constantine, a supernatural P.I. with a bad habit of leaving damned loved ones in his wake, was created by Alan Moore of Watchmen fame during his pre-Watchmen run on the series Swamp Thing. In Rankin's standalone volume, Constantine joins the cast of a reality TV show, essentially a version of Big Brother. Ghost-busting ensues. This is a classic example for novels of horror, ghost, exorcism, monster, spooky genre! Ian Rankin starts the story as if the plot is small and easy and just another Haunted-house story. But with one after another surprisingly enjoyable twists it becomes so huge and so epic (from Heaven to Hell all the way) that it is beyond explanation! Carfax soon embraces her point of view as well as the fact that the island constantly seems to change, and they spend the time in dual solipsism, but one day he awakes to make a terrible observation – one that seems to betoken a rarely-told truth on a life spent on and in itself. A train passenger who has to spend the night in a waiting room connects with the dead and finds that there seems to be an unspoken assumption of understanding between him and them.

Another story I rather enjoyed is the final story in the book entitled "Bind Your Hair" a quite bizarre and strange story. Dark Entries tries to bill itself as an old school John Constantine story. It doesn't quite measure up. That is not to say it is not interesting and it does display a small shadow of the angst driven "real" JC stories (such as Hellblazer vol 1 and on). My second favourite story, dealing with Carfax, a convalescent young man, who accepts a young woman’s invitation to her house which is situated on an island. They pass the days indulging in conversations about arts, or playing the piano and the protagonist finally falls in love with the woman, who embodies a philosophy of egotistical aestheticism, mirrored in a statement like this: A contributor to BBC2's Newsnight Review, he also presented his own TV series, Ian Rankin's Evil Thoughts, on Channel 4 in 2002. He recently received the OBE for services to literature, and opted to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons.These are NOT horror stories. Some of them hardly even seem to be stories at all...they're more like windows that look briefly on to some strange portion of someone's life and then they move on. There is no clear plot or point usually, but I found myself thinking deeply about every one of these tales, wondering if there were some hidden meaning that I wasn't getting. There was one seemingly clear ghost story here, "The Waiting Room." (I wonder if it was decided that there needed to be one clear, straightforward story included with this collection just to give the reader a break from all the thinking?) This sentence speaks volumes about the tension between the two characters of "The View," but also of the sensitivities of each character toward one another. One should not be surprised, then to find that "The View" is winsome and absolutely heart-rending. It has caused in me a genuine fear of growing old, something I have never really felt before. This is more from the sense of things past and lost than worry about future decrepitude. This is the empty hole at the center of nostalgia, a true existential dread. This story bit deep into my heart. It hurt, and I am better for it. I think my favorite story in this collection was the last one, "Bind Your Hair". I'm still thinking about it. I'm still thinking about "Ringing the Changes" as well. Don't ask me why, because I don't know...but it's still turning round in my noggin just the same.