Bookish Thoughts

Season of Mists  is the fourth volume of ten in the Sandman  series. We're nearly halfway through. And yet, this almost feels like the beginning. Maybe it's because of how much the world deepens here. We finally meet the rest of Dream's family (minus Destruction), and the mythology expands considerably. Maybe it's the huge jump in quality. The previous issues weren't bad, but this one pushes the series from good to great. Or maybe it's just my own nostalgia. This was my favorite story arc for a very long time. Whatever it is, it was a joy to get to this point and fall in love with the series all over again. The first time I read this, the story blew my mind. Lucifer quits! He locks up Hell and leaves! He forfeits his never-ending war with God in favor of sitting on a beach and watching the sunset. It was the first time I encountered God and Lucifer as characters in a story, rather than all-powerful deities. In my mind, it removed a lot of their power. Lucife...

The third volume of the Sandman  series isn't an overarching arc at all. Rather it collects four individual stories into a single collection. Given that, I'm going to take each story separately. Calliope:  Initially, this was one of my favorite stories in Sandman . When I was first collecting the series (a process that took me years), I revisited this story again and again. In later years it lost it's shine somewhat, and I became hugely critical of it. Now I think I've landed somewhere in the middle. This is a story of exploitation. Calliope is a muse who has been captured. She's held hostage by an author who literally rapes her as a way of getting new ideas. When he sells her to another author rather than setting her free, as he'd promised, she loses her last shred of hope and asks Dream to help her. My issue with this story basically comes down to Calliope and her treatment, both by the fictional authors who hold her hostage (Erasmus Fry and Richard Mado...

The Doll's House  is my least favorite arc in the entire Sandman  series. For me, the horror in this installment crosses the line and makes me truly uncomfortable. John Dee slowly torturing and killing everyone in the diner in 24 Hours  is disturbing. But there's an element of fantasy, of metaphor, that makes it a bit more palatable. This arc has some pretty horrific child abuse coupled with a serial killer convention. And while Morpheus metes out justice to everyone involved, I find myself squirming through a lot of this. Then again, The Doll's House  introduces Rose Walker and Hob Gadling, two of the best characters in the entire series. Men of Good Fortune , Gadling's introduction, is one of my favorite single issues. Gadling declares that he's not going to die, and Morpheus sets up a recurring meeting with him - once every hundred years - to see how his life is going. The story leans into the old adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same, ...

For years I claimed to hate horror. I can see now how absurd that statement is. When I was growing up, my favorite television show was Buffy the Vampire Slayer . And while it's a bit trite to say that Sandman  changed my life, it certainly awakened any number of nascent interests in me, from mythology to non-linear story-structures. Two of the most formative works from my teenage years, and both are classic examples of horror. But for a long time I didn't know this. In my world, both of these series were classified as fantasy. Horror was Scream  and it's various sequels and spin-offs. Saw  and Halloween  and Final Destination . All those movies were characters died in ever more gruesome fashions. It's a subset of horror that's been popular for a while now. So popular that I thought it was the whole of the genre. It wasn't until I heard someone describe Sandman  as horror that I began to open my eyes and understand how much I actually loved this genre. I like...