Dark Entries

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I say music - the musical elements of the writing seem at times as important as the words, and the effect of the stories is similar. Recounting the plot - there's no such thing as a "spoiler" in these stories, and the stories are about their style. I could tell you how they end, and it would change nothing of the effect. He's not writing to tell a gripping yarn, he's providing an "impression" which can be beautiful (exceptionally so), or unsettling, or terrifying. Mystery pervades, if you're looking for answers to the questions, you are missing the point of the story.

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.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.

he . . . did not risk another of those so natural interrogatives she so lightly made to seem so heavy and unnecessary. You live surrounded by the claims of other people: to your labour when they call it peace, your life when they call it war; to your celibacy when they call you a bachelor, your body when they call you a husband. They tell you where you shall live, what you shall do, and what thoughts are dangerous.”Bind Your Hair’ follows a young woman, Clarinda, as visits her fiancé’s family home and develops a fascination with Mrs Pagani, a charismatic woman she meets at a party. Again it is the atmosphere of the setting – the wet, foggy lanes lined with dripping trees – that make the greatest impression. 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. Ringing the Changes has a town that embraces the undead, and a couple that becomes trapped there. it has a suspenseful and eventually hair-raising narrative. but it is not about the undead; it is about the distance between two lovers, the distance that becomes apparent when contrasting the new and the old. a younger woman sees things her way, and rushes forward; she may quail in fear but she will dance with the dead. an older man sees his age, his ineffectuality; he will try to cross a gap and he will fail, impotent. The story I most enjoyed in "Dark Entries" (His second collection of stories following "We Are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories") is the story called "The View" (Which was originally printed in his first collection "Six Ghost Stories"). The story concerns the protagonist a gentleman named Carfax a vulnerable and exhausted man who needs to get away from the hectic life in the city. He meets a beautiful woman on a sea voyage who invites him to stay with her in her home. As the story evolves we glimpse Carfax's voyage from imagined self doubt into the fringes of madness, yet hopelessly madly in love with his Femme Fatal. This is one great story.

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. 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. Her expression indicated that she was one of those people whose friendliness has a precise and never-exceeded limit. 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.Straddling a very wobbly line between neo-noir and straight-out horror, “Dark Entries” is also a satirical criticism of reality-TV.

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. 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. Ian Rankin είχα διαβάσει μέχρι τώρα (αν είναι δυνατόν!), ούτε κόμικ με ήρωα τον John Constantine, παρ'όλα αυτά το απόλαυσα πραγματικά. Η ιστορία μου κίνησε το ενδιαφέρον από την αρχή και το κράτησε μέχρι το τέλος, μιας και η πλοκή είχε αρκετό μυστήριο και ωραίες αποκαλύψεις, ενώ και ο χαρακτήρας του Constantine ήταν ιδιαίτερα ενδιαφέρων, κυνικός και σαρκαστικός. Το σκίτσο μου φάνηκε αρκετά καλό και απόλυτα ταιριαστό με το ύφος της ιστορίας, με απλά και καθαρά ασπρόμαυρα σχέδια, δίχως αχρείαστες λεπτομέρειες και σκιές. The Waiting Room has a traveler stranded in a train station, home to ghosts who were buried beneath. it is a ghost story and it is not a ghost story. it is about loneliness, a man as an island, a man alone and unconsciously yearning for a community, for support in his lonely world. he sleeps, and lives a brief dream of a happiness he has never had. he barely recognizes his own desperate need. 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?)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. 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.] 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.