Read FSF, January-February 2010 for Free Online Page A

pieces throughout the text as a determined Caldecott and reluctant Winter track down the kidnappers. The latter are from “Black London,” a dangerous hidden world where supernatural creatures live, magic is real, and life is cheap.
    Winter is completely at home in Black London, respected and feared, with a running Escape from New York joke where the first thing everyone says when they see him is, “I thought you were dead.” Caldecott has connections to the hidden realm as well, something that surprises and frightens her, but not enough to stop her from tracking down the kidnappers who, by this point, have snatched more than one child.
    Now I've heard that some British readers find that the Brit idioms in Street Magic don't entirely ring true to their ears, but I, and I'm sure most North American readers, won't pick up on that. The dialogue worked for me. I liked the back and forth between Caldecott and Winter and how Caldecott doesn't suffer fools. She's bright, smart, full of attitude, but with the wherewithal to back it up. Black London succeeds in being both quirky and dark, and includes a great updating of the Green Man theme. And the story itself works as a bewitching combination of fantasy, punky mainstream, horror, and noir detective.
    I even liked Jack Winter.
    All in all, it's a terrific debut of a new series except for one thing: I've met Jack Winter before.
    Now I understand offering up a homage to another creator's work. It's part of the conversation of art where one work inspires another. But there's no indication anywhere in the text that Kittredge is paying tribute to John Constantine, the character Alan Moore created in Swamp Thing . Constantine went on to be featured in his own series, Hellblazer , which is still being published on a monthly basis.
    Kittredge's Winter is more like Constantine than Keanu Reeves was in the movie Hellblazer , and that was an official adaptation. The similarities abound: their punk rock beginnings, the London setting (okay, Constantine is from Newcastle, but he's best known for being based in London), the disastrous spell gone wrong in their past, the bleached hair, the self-centered personalities that rub everybody the wrong way until they turn on the charm, the hodge-podge magic that gets them out of one scrape after another, but with an underlying understanding that they also carry a bigger and more dangerous magical heritage.
    Sure, there are little differences, but they're inconsequential. The only real difference is that Winter is a junkie (something the cover artist or art director missed with the buff Winter on the book's cover, but that isn't Kittredge's fault.)
    I really wanted to like this book. I really did like it, but I kept getting kicked out when one more thing would remind me of how this could just as easily be a novelization of a Hellblazer story, though of course it isn't.
    What's disappointing about this is that Kittredge has the writing chops and imagination to spare. She shows flare and originality throughout Street Magic , except with this one character. Unfortunately, this character is a major one, and unlike borrowing from folklore or mythology, he's not up for grabs.
    * * * *
    Dark Entries , by Ian Rankin & Werther Dell'edera, Vertigo Crime, 2009, $19.99.
    * * * *
    And speaking of John Constantine, crime writer Ian Rankin takes a turn penning a story that sees Constantine coming up against the horror of...reality television.
    Haunted Mansion is a new British reality show and a huge success until the house actually starts attacking the contestants. Constantine is called in as a consultant and is put into the house and on the show to see if he can find out what's going on from the inside. The problem is, the whole thing's a trap set especially for Constantine, and there's no way out.
    Rankin brings a new spin to the character, placing him in a far different setting than the usual seedy London streets where we would expect to find Constantine. But