Sandman: Endless Nights

[gement]

The art is incredible. The stories are very good, and very good Sandman.

I can see the reviewer's point (I believe it was on CNN.com, it's linked from officialgaiman) who said he didn't like Endless Nights quite as much because he's been keeping up with Gaiman's novel-writing career and the man has written stories at this point that far surpass these vignettes in power and sweep. (I'm completely paraphrasing. I believe the original quote was along the lines of, "Come on, Neil. I've seen you give us better than this. Don't hold back.")

If I step back and remember that these are not only short stories, but short stories with very tight text restrictions, they look a lot better. No fair comparing a short to a novel and asking it to offer as much subtlety or scope.

The portraits of Despair were chilling, I'll be quoting Del for a month, Desire's chapter was suggestive porn at its best, and Destruction was... wow-sexy-yum. There were beautiful art shots of all of them.

Worth my money in hard back. Probably will end up chained to my shelf.

On rereading this is a pretty bipolar review. I've come straight off of rereading several of his novels, so it's hard to switch back into Sandman gear. Once I did, very tasty stuff.

Comments

[capnexposition.livejournal.com]

Despair and Delirium's stories both made me feel kind of upset. Despair for obvious reasons, Delerium...Delerium because maybe I saw a little too much of myself in some of the characters. Always alarming to see a bit of what one perceives as oneself in print.
I for one really disliked Dream's story. Is it just me, or has his character devolved into a simple foil for the others to move around? And as I have been insisting for a fair bit of time now, I think Destiny gets the short end of the stick every darn time. The other five were all sterling though, IMO.

[gement.livejournal.com]

Now I'm curious about where you self-identified in Delirium's chapter.

I had about the same assessment of the two you disliked, but my problem with the Dream story was less "2D foil" and more "completely restricted by name-dropping." The little snubnosed yellow kid irritated me. Even from the single teaser page on DC's site I knew what the plot would be, and I had hoped it would be subtler. C'mon, Desire, if that's your idea of a joke, I've got a sale on banana peels you can put on steps.

On the other hand, we are the few (okay, many), the proud, the analysed-Sandman-to-death-and-memorized-the-whole-thing crowd. After you've grokked the Big Story, well, some of the little stories are a foregone conclusion. Dream in White is still a dynamic character, because, without saying anything spoilish, he's still dynamic. The true tragedy of Morpheus is that we do know how he will behave, in any given situation.

Destiny's story was an art romp, but, well, Destiny's worse than Dream for predictable. All he does is turn pages. What else should he do? He'd look at you blankly, no pun intended, if you suggested anything else.

The only times I've seen Destiny outside his garden were for the wakes (an official function), in this chapter (an official function) and in Books of Magic at the end, when there were no more paths in existence. Workaholics, true workaholics, don't have a lot of stories, unless he's let himself be swayed by Desire, which doesn't seem like his style.