Tonight we wrap up the main series of The Sandman, a series that spans twelve collected volumes (the ten from the main series The Sandman issued between 1989 and 1996), plus the special collected editions that became Endless Nights and The Sandman Overture, a series that covers better than two thousand pages of art and text. The work is one of Neil Gaiman’s earliest, and if after finishing he had retired to a farm and spent the rest of his life herding sheep we would still discuss the artistry and philosophical depth of his work; doctoral dissertations would still be forthcoming about his themes and his critical contributions to myth, theology, literature, etc.
I could spend a couple thousand words as a paean to Gaiman’s artistry, but it doesn’t serve any point. It’s enough to say that if you love literature and are kindly disposed to fantasy, you already know The Sandman, or you will. It stands on its own. Tonight we’re going to wrap up the saga by looking at the two add-on volumes: Endless Nights and The Sandman Overture.
Be warned: there be spoilers ahead. I’ll try not to open the whole candy story, but I can’t write about any of it without passing out a few sweets.
Nights of the Endless
In 2003, in the introduction to Endless Nights, Gaiman wrote, “This volume exists because there were artists I wanted to work with, and stories I wanted to tell” (1, p.8). The quality of the volume is uneven, as Gaiman collections tend to be (witness Trigger Warnings, which anthologizes both the superb Shadow story “Black Dog” and a throwaway poem about building a chair, and one of these things is definitely not like the other). Each one of the Endless Night stories centers on one of the Endless siblings. The stories about Destiny and Despair are rather thin, since neither is a particularly inspiring protagonist. Don’t read Despair’s story if you’re at all depressed, although anyone who’s survived an essay final that constitutes 50% of your semester grade will appreciate #13.
Death does a star turn in “Death and Venice,” (yes, the Thomas Mann joke applies). The story concerns a soldier who helps Death break a 250-year old spell that keeps one day repeating on an island in the Venice lagoon and keeps Death at bay. Count Alain, warned of Death’s approach, belts on his sword, saying of his adversary,
You are time. Foul time, who steals the gold from a maiden’s hair and takes the sapphire from a child’s eyes.
Dark time, who has stolen from every thing there ever was the things that it held precious and divine….
and left nothing but memories and ashes and the grave. (1, p. 29)
Of course he’s wrong. He doesn’t face Time. Seeing his nemesis, he recognizes her, saying, “I missed you...so badly” (1, p. 31).
The narrator Sergei feels the same way. As do we all.
Desire gets one of the best stories, mostly because it’s not about Desire of the Endless, but about the effect of desire, and the uses to which it can be turned. Pleasant diversions, both of stories, but they don’t add to the canon. Still, they’re worth reading.
Endless Nights fills out The Sandman canon in the three remaining tales. The first, “The Heart of a Star,” featuring Dream, is the earliest of all the stories about stories, and takes place
...long ago.
How long ago?
Imagine time. Imagine all the time that there ever was, all the time there ever will be. In this totality of time, a hundred thousand years is an eyeblink, a million years passes like a sigh.
And even in that totality of time, this takes place a long time ago….and far, far away” (1, p. 59)
back when Desire and Dream were close, and Dream was in love for the first time. We get to see the first Despair, and Delight before she became Delirium, Death in her emo phase, and a young and gentle Destruction. The First Council is getting together to set rules for the universe, and Dream brings his girlfriend to meet the family. We meet Sol, our own star, in his awkward adolescence. We also meet Destiny, who was probably born old. He tells Dream’s lover Killala,
You are a mortal woman. Millennia from now, it will be decided that the Endless may not love mortals. You will be discussed and remembered and talked about many times in those discussions (1, p. 71)
because, of course, Desire can’t help but meddle, and Killala falls in love with a star, Sto-Oa, who takes her (literally) into his heart. This begins the ancient grudge between Desire and Dream that will drive so much of The Sandman. And we see the prohibition that causes so much torment to poor Nada.
The other two stories occur after Morpheus’ death. In “Going Inside,” Delirium loses herself in her realm, too deep for anyone to follow her. Barnabas and Dream recruit a half-dozen of the mentally-ill to be her rescue party, since no one who’s sane can go into this disjointed and trippy reality. Significantly, it’s Dream who works with Barnabas to save her, an encouraging sign for those of us invested in Dream’s universe, a universe that will continue to exist in our hearts.
Finally, there’s “Destruction on the Peninsula.” Like “Desire,” “Destruction on the Peninsula” features a female narrator whose encounter with the Endless fundamentally changes both her life and her perspective. The archaeologist, Rachel, suffers from terrifying dreams that are leaking into her waking world when a colleague, Stanley, offers her a respite on a classified dig in Sardinia near where two hippies, Destruction and Delirium, have been camping. The site is turning up artifacts from a future that is distressingly apocalyptic.
The site, Delirium tells Rachel, exists, “because of me. Or because of him, maybe, or both of us. I guess it’s both of us, really, being here, that does it.” She also tells Rachel that “he has to stay sort of near me for a bit. They asked him to keep an eye on me. The rest of my family...because I was sick, I guess….They don’t want me to be on my own” (1, p. 135).
So Destruction has returned to the family, if not to his realm. It’s evident that Morpheus’ death and restoration has been a pivotal event in the Endless universe, knitting the siblings together in closer relationships—well, Delirium, Destruction, and Dream, anyway.
The Sandman Overture
In 2015, the publication of The Sandman Overture was met more with fear than anticipation. After almost twenty years, for Gaiman to go back to his first major work and succumb to the same prequel /origin story fever that had swept both the DC and Marvel universes—although sure to be a commercial success, how could he possibly live up to the standard The Sandman had set? Flop sweat was near universal.
And entirely unwarranted. “A feast for the eyes,” proclaimed Bookmunch, and the reviewer wasn’t kidding. The Guardian called it “a thrilling resurrection,” and Leah Schnelbach of Tor wrote, “this is a great book. While a few of the thematic elements are overstated, the writing is gorgeous, and the art is breathtaking.” This is one of the very few occasions where the praise is too faint.
A few critics complain that the Sandman universe ties up a little too neatly, but that’s a matter of taste. After reading all of the Sandman corpus, to come to the Overture and witness Gaiman’s achievement in pulling everything together is nothing less than thrilling.
The year is 1915, and somewhere a cosmic catastrophe is spreading. One incarnation of Dream dies, and the rest of them are pulled together to figure out what has happened. Two Dreams, one the Morpheus-form and the other a giant cat, journey together on a quest to save the universe. First stop, to see Glory of the First Circle, who tells Morpheus, ”You are here, because a child lived, and a world died, a long time ago” (2).
We know from The Doll’s House that Morpheus still harbors guilt for not destroying a dream vortex an age ago, and instead of killing one person to save the Dreaming he ended up having to kill a whole world. Here we learn the whole story and witness the mistake he made a long time ago in failing to kill the star of that world as well as the world itself. He pleads fatigue, but there is a deeper unstated reason. The star, Sto-Oa, containing the essence of his first lover Kallalla, has gone mad, and the madness spreads across the universe, sparking destruction everywhere. Glory is right: this is Morpheus’ fault and, recognizing his culpability, Morpheus sets out to make it right.
The volume is filled with sorrow, death, beauty, humanity and compassion. There’s also a wry subtle humor that leavens the weighter material. For instance, when Morpheus is called to join with all his various aspects to figure out why one of them died, it’s a funhouse mirror argument, which leads to this exchange:
[Morpheus:] Am I always like this?
[A Different Dream:] Like what?
[Morpheus:] Self-satisfied. Irritating. Self-possessed and unwilling to concede center stage to anyone but myself.
[Same Different Dream:] I believe so, yes. In my experience.
[Morpheus:] Ah. fascinating.
With only himself (in the form of a giant cat) for company, Morpheus sets out on his quest: first to the city of the stars and then to see his parents Time and Night. None of these efforts go well, but he keeps trying.
Even as Morpheus is occupied and then imprisoned, the Dream Cat has made something that is not in Destiny’s book—a ship in which the cat has culled a thousand lives from the many dying worlds. Those thousand souls, led by the spirit of a dead child, hold the power to remake reality, just as a thousand humans subverted the supremacy of cats once before.
The Dream Cat isn’t exactly a Dream cat, and the Overture, in a neat twist, shows us the fundamental strength of even dysfunctional siblings. Here we see Desire at its best
Time folds, disjoints itself, makes giant loops, and cause/effect relationships break down. Telling Mad Hettie, “Time goes in so many ways, Henrietta. It runs. Sometimes it even flies. But as for telling the time….somewhat what time tells us is for it alone to know,” post-Morpheus Dream flings a saeculum into the void, returning it to Father Time, just in time for Morpheus to benefit from Dad’s good mood. The crucible event, the great Dreaming on the ship, the battle that utterly exhausts Morpheus and earns him congratulations from Glory and approval from his parents, is also the event that leaves him vulnerable to Burgess and his hedge-magic.
With this volume, The Sandman is complete. The end is the beginning, and nothing of the old world remains except one thing: Morpheus has promised that he will remember the little girl from the Place Not Even The Endless May Go: Hope Beautiful Lost Nebula. He will always remember Hope.
Next week we’ll talk about Sandman mythology and the importance of the whole work. Then (sigh) farewell to Morpheus and Gaiman, for now, anyway.
References
1. Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Endless Nights. NY: Vertigo, 2003.
2. Neil Gaiman, The Sandman Overture. NY: Vertigo: 2015. This volume is unpaginated; you’re on your own.
Previous Sandman Diaries