“You Get A Lifetime”

This post is the first of a few that will present items of mine 'from the archives...'. I've written for fanzines and other web pages in the past, so I'll use the opportunity to represent some old pieces of writing to get them back out there all in one place.

This one is a review of Neil Gaiman's “THE SANDMAN: ENDLESS NIGHTS” originally written for Sci-Fi-London.

Over a period of nine years from 1987 to 1996, Neil Gaiman reworked a mostly disregarded Golden Age D.C. Comics superhero, “The Sandman” into one of the premier horror / fantasy sagas of the last twenty years and working himself up from a virtually unknown journalist to the multi-award winning, multi-talented member of the so-called ‘British Invasion’ of the American comics industry that we know today.

Ending “The Sandman”, quite appropriately and deliberately, with the tale of William Shakespeare writing “The Tempest”, Gaiman laid down his pen and turned to other works, leaving others to play in the toybox of his creation with only a fatherly eye and occasional guiding hand. The epic novel for adults “American Gods”, children’s fiction like “Coraline” (now out in paperback) and the recently released “The Wolves in the Walls” as well as turning his hand to film and television scripting and directing the film “A Short film about John Bolton” kept him busy enough, but he also finds time to keep an online journal up to date.

And always he maintained that he would return to his best known creations, Dream of the Endless and his six siblings who are not gods, but something far, far more that gods bow down to. Now Neil brings us a plush hardcover anthology entitled “Endless Nights” where each of the Endless is given their moment in the spotlight. Some are proper stories, with a beginning, a middle and an end, that show who these Endless are and how they affect the mere mortals whose brief lives they touch upon, while others are more like poetry with indescribably gorgeous or indescribably strange artwork.

To touch upon everything this book has to offer would take more space than is available here, but the highlights for this poor-Sandman starved reviewer are the erotically charged (and with such a subject how can it be anything else) Desire story, “What I’ve tasted of Desire” (art by Milo Manara) and “The Heart of a Star” (art by Miguelanxo Prado), a tale of King Morpheus, that is by turns beautifully heartfelt, monstrously ugly and inestimably silly, which I suppose sums up the whole saga of “The Sandman” in itself.

There is nothing in “Endless Nights” that would stop the casual reader from picking it up as the first example of “The Sandman” that they have ever read, but as a long time aficionado of the series I feel this is more of an “icing on the cake” situation where it would give more to the long term reader. Indeed, I suspect that the twenty pound price tag may scare of a large number of potential first timers, so while I can wholeheartedly praise this stunningly attractive tome, if you’ve come to the party late then I suggest you search out the trade paperback editions of the original series.

You’ll thank me for it.

Really.

2011 Postscript - Endless Nights is due to be reprinted as part of the fifth volume of the Absolute Sandman series due to be published in November.