Dark Entries

John Constantine's never been my favourite character. I like him enough in small doses (like in his roles in Moore's Swamp Thing and brief appearances in Gaiman's Sandman and Books of Magic series), but I've never found him interesting enough to be a protagonist.

I do have a fondness for haunted house stories, though, especially when elements of reality TV are thrown in the mix (van Belkom's Scream Queen, the Halloween: Resurrection film), and this one seemed to have some shades of Whedon's Dollhouse thrown in as well, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

It's a fairly good story - Rankin knows how to lure a reader in by giving them just enough information that they can start to draw their own conclusions, but not so much that you guess where everything's going. The art is, for the most part, servicable but not anything special, aside from one nice little trick with the colouring of the page borders after a certain key plot point. I suppose that when you've lured in a novelist as popular as Rankin, of course, the art becomes a secondary concern.

The one thing I really didn't understand about this book is that it's a launch title for the new “Vertigo Crime” sub-imprint ... but it's not really a crime story at all, just a typical Vertigo-type story told by an established crime author. I really hope that's not going to be typical of the VC line.