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. In tal senso, un racconto come “La scelta delle armi”, piuttosto raffinato nell’evidenziare con minacciose allusioni la scarsa consapevolezza di sé nel momento dell’esercizio sentimentale, avrebbe guadagnato nella portata drammatica con un’atmosfera surreale meno pervasiva e, al contrario, più attenta ai dettagli del contesto reale.

As a friend noted, the main characters aren't particularly interesting. The mystery, which appears to really mean "puzzle" here, is what it's about. The characters are puzzle pieces, and it is neat to see how they fit together, and Rankin did a really good job of rationalizing all that into the Hellblazer mode (tying it to one character who is the fulcrum for it all). But, yeah, the characters have no development, aside from shifting from not knowing their fate to knowing it, and from us misinterpreting their dreams to being told flat-out what those dreams "symbolize" (a direct causality that is too clean-cut even for Freud, and utterly disinterested in the ambiguity inherent in the surreal). If anything, the characters change depending on what the story needs. At times, just in time for whatever the imminent joke needs. 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. Straddling a very wobbly line between neo-noir and straight-out horror, “Dark Entries” is also a satirical criticism of reality-TV. 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."

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. The tale of “an ever-open mouth of a house”, which gets hold of a middle-aged woman, plunging her into madness and tapping her vitality, told by her former school friend who learns that it may not be too wise an idea to pry too closely into other people’s life. It may be that the narrator’s friend is a victim of domestic abuse but it may also be that the house is possessed by an evil force that tries to feed on her. Somehow it simultaneously roams around the fields of murder mystery, thriller, suspense with excellent balance and grabs 200% attention of the reader's mind. The writing is so smooth as if we have already been reading about this long ago. The characters, the twists, action, the dialogues are top notch! No, seriously top notch! And Mr John F'ing Constantine is at his best in the book luv! (Satan can go n' eat his heart out. Wait, does he have one?) And then there's the overarching issue, which isn't Rankin's fault. This is just the whole "how do the western underpinnings of Constantine's metaphysics reconcile themselves with non-western metaphysics." I really feel for the Japanese character, for example: not just because she was molested by salarymen on trains, and not just because the comic's editor let the artist let the reader ogle her (talk about adding insult to injury -- though I guess here it works, a little, because the panels mimic the reality-TV viewer's perspective), but mostly because she was raised in a non-western country yet finds herself, after dying, left to deal with an overlord who is, for all intents and purposes, the western conception of the devil. I mean, you can read as much Joseph Campbell as you want and assume all myths are just masks painted on the faces of shared myths, but for a self-consciously cynical comic, Hellblazer really is beholden to powers it is smart enough to, but too lazy to, wrestle with. (Again, this is an ongoing failure of Hellblazer, not just of Rankin's entry, though he does fail to even remotely explore 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. 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. 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. The Waiting Room: Very much a traditional ghost story but masterfully framed for maximum disorientation.John Constantine, the occult detective and only man to get out of Hell alive, is a familiar character. He goes where no one wants to go and does what no one even thinks about doing. In this graphic novel he gets involved with a reality show. In my opinion, reality shows are about as real as professional wrestling. Never the less, they are very popular and cheap to produce.

Apartments of the most various shapes and sizes led into one another in all directions without doors; and as no two apartments seemed to be decorated alike, the mirrors set up a chiaroscuro of reflections co-existent with but apparently independent of the rich and bewildering chiaroscuro of the apartments themselves. 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. John Constantine, να συμμετάσχει στο παιχνίδι και να ανακαλύψει τι γίνεται. Όμως τα πράγματα δεν είναι καθόλου όπως φαίνονται... 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. 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 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.

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.

If Hell's residents can tunnel so easily into Limbo, well, that's kind of a major mess of story that makes the plight of these few 20somethings seem kinda slight by comparison. And again, it's just left dangling. 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. 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. 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). I really loved Ringing the Changes, The View and Bind Your Hair with The Waiting Room being the weakest.