Dark Entries

Product Information

A Big Brother type house and it's contestants are being haunted by ghosts so the show's producer gets Constantine in to investigate. Things become stranger as none of the contestants can remember how they came on the show or much about their past. Then about the halfway point things get very Hellblazer and the story takes off. Yeah, spoilers. Boilerplate, polite version: I promise I don't "spoil" anything about this book that would have bothered me had I known about it in advance of reading this book. That said, I cannot think of anything I have read in my life that would have been spoiled had I known the plot-advancing facts. And this is not, I promise, a mini–Cliffs Notes–style detailed summary of the story. Perhaps the only real way to "spoil" a book is to detail any serious flaws in logic, to the extent that you then can't get them out of your head as you read the book. I can't promise that I don't to that -- but neither can anyone else.] 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.

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. Enter “John”, a music promoter, as a last-minute contestant. It doesn’t take Constantine long to figure out what is going on, but it may be too late for him to do anything about it. 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. The Waiting Room: Very much a traditional ghost story but masterfully framed for maximum disorientation. Bind Your Hair has a woman engaged to a man, and visiting his perfectly nice relatives in the country. a loving home that feels increasingly like a comfy trap, a soft and pillowy place where she may lose herself. it has a country village where people gather in the evenings, their clean strong limbs bared to the moon... for what purpose? it has two children, a peremptory guide and a savage biter. our heroine can barely resist them. bind your hair; bind away all that is you and become one of us.I was undecidd as to how rate this collection - I was divided between three and four stars, as some of these stories appealed little to me - but in the end decided on four stars due to the strength and quality of the best stories here collected.

Straddling a very wobbly line between neo-noir and straight-out horror, “Dark Entries” is also a satirical criticism of reality-TV. 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). 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?) I really loved Ringing the Changes, The View and Bind Your Hair with The Waiting Room being the weakest.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.