I'm about seven chapters in and I've gotta say this book is abysmal. It's poorly written, shallow and feels rushed. A lot of the subtle moments are totally removed; the tone of the Jokers voice, his walk, just how terrifying he is for example, all these details add up to make a mental picture in your mind which is part of what reading fiction is all about. O'Neil describes none of them, the Joker could be a postman for all the info we get. We recieve no inclination about how the characters are feeling, or how they do things - much of the dialogue from the film is reported with litltle emotion and it feels as if Denny O Neil was rushing his way through the Nolan script in order to meet a tight deadline. The action scenes are dull and overall the writing just feels stale, it doesn't jump off the page at all. A sample of the turgid writing; he describes Comissioner Leob's death as '...he made a few gurgling sounds and within seconds was dead.' Talk about sucking the drama out of the scene. There's also page after page of boring exposition. Fair enough, the story of what Crane got up to after 'Begins' is a neat inclusion, but it bogs down the book and gets in the way of the actual TDK story. O' Neil seems to do this for more than one of the characters, even the infodump for Bruce Wayne is annoying. The events of the film don't begin until you're a quater of the way through the book, the first couple of chapters should've been called 'In case you haven't read Batman Begins...' Very poor. Only earns a star because I'm a Batman fanatic.