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." I have retained an impression of ‘Ringing the Changes’ as a real classic, and it was a pleasure to revisit it. A recently married couple, Gerald and Phrynne, take their honeymoon in a small town on the Norfolk coast. From the beginning, they find Holyhaven an odd and unwelcoming place. When a cacophony of bell-ringing – apparently an annual custom – strikes up, Gerald becomes increasingly convinced they must leave. The strange local ritual builds to a horrifying climax which seems to leave the couple divided in unspoken ways. Before DC pulled the plug on their adult-oriented horror line, Vertigo, they were still doing some really interesting things. In 2009, Vertigo started a Vertigo Crime series, a digest-sized hardcover graphic novel series written by well-known authors in the crime/mystery genre. 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'. 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.

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 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. 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.]In “Choice of Weapons” a man abandons his heiress girlfriend, and the secure future she represents, to chase after a girl he glimpses across a restaurant. His obsession leads him to cross swords with a dangerous otherworldly rival for her love. The hero in “The View”, meanwhile, meets a beautiful, enigmatic woman on the ferry from Liverpool to the Isle of Man and is soon sharing her stately home and her bed. Such is his infatuation that he is not deterred by the way the landscape around the house is constantly changing or the weird, shambling figure – like some sort of nameless pagan god – who roams the grounds. 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.

Straddling a very wobbly line between neo-noir and straight-out horror, “Dark Entries” is also a satirical criticism of reality-TV.

All I can say is oh my! This book contains a bunch of good creepers. Especially "Ringing The Changes".