Dream Country contains 4 disturbing stories: Calliope, A Dream of a Thousand Cats, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, and Facade. Plus, Gaiman has included his script for Calliope which gives us insight into Gaiman's writing process on this particular story.

Calliope was difficult for me to read. Artfully done and intriguing, the story features a young author who comes into possession of a muse (who used to date...is that the right word?...Dream) and uses her to become rich and famous. That is not the difficult part. The author rapes the muse. And not only do we read about it: "She's not even human, he told himself. She's thousands of years old. But her flesh was warm, and her breath was sweet, and she choked back tears like a child whenever he hurt her." But since this is a graphic novel, we also get to see it. Rape is so abhorrent to me that I dislike seeing it in books or films.

A Dream of a Thousand Cats freaked me out with its focus on the possibility of dreams. In it, a group of cats listen as one cat tells them about their power to change the world, to re-elevate cats over humans, through a mutual dream. I find cats terrifying; I find the images in this story stomach-clenching. The illustrators manage to create visuals of cats that are at once familiar and highly other. It may have been my favorite of the collection.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titiana and Auberon arrive as guests of Dream to watch Shakespeare and Company present A Midsummer Night's Eve. I loved the layers of this story, the intricacy of a play about fairies being shown to the real fairies. And who doesn't love Puck?

Facade features Urania Blackwell, a lonely woman, altered by Ra, able to change her physicality but unable to fix her destroyed face. She uses masks to hide her disfigurement but is still primarily a solitary figure. Death reappears in this story, as an unexpected consolation. ( )

Neil Gaiman has written that upon completing the Doll's House story arc he wanted to do some stand-alone short stories, hence the collection of 4 stories in this third volume of the complete Sandman Collection. One of these stories (A Midsummer Night's Dream) won the World Fantasy Award, but personally none of the storys here really stood out for me. Interesting, entertaining, bizarre, but not outstanding. ( )

http://books.moonsoar.com/archives/20... ( )

Dream Country is one of the collections of stories that can get a little annoying. Don't get me wrong, I still like it, but it's only the third volume of the Sandman series, the readers are very recently introduced to multiple siblings of the Endless, and yet none of the stories in DC (the title of the volume, not the comic book company) are specifically about Dream or his siblings. Even though the stories presented in DC are well written, very touching and really only mildly disturbing, the reader yearns to know more about the Endless and DC simply doesn't provide that. In addition to which, DC is very short, a good third of the book is merely the manuscript for the first story, Calliope, and one of the stories is written primarily in Shakespearian which, at best, I understand poorly.

Despite these subjective "flaws" I found three fifths of the book to be extraordinary, so it receives three and a half stars, and I move on to the next volume hoping for more about the Endless. Facade is one of my favorite short stories and deserves individual praise even if I find the book as a whole to be one of the lesser Sandman collections. Facade is also interesting because it's a direct contrast to Men of Good Fortune and it shows giving up and 'choosing' death in a better light than we often see it. ( )

The third Sandman volume, Dream Country is a collection of short stories following the Doll's House arc. While there is no overarching story arc in the collection, there is of course a sense of relevance as each part develops the Sandman's universe and other characters - especially his sister, Death, in the final part.

Included with the set is an interest bonus - a copy of the script for one of the parts (Calliope). Neil introduces is as merely an example of one script, for one issue, in one comic series by one author. It is a fun little bonus, and he likens it to the curiosity of a magicians show - while it may ruin the illusion for some, most people have an insatiable, unquenchable thirst to see how it is done.

As always, the artists change from story to story, or at least every few stories, offering different artistic styles that enhance each story and make them even more unique. This works particularly well in a collection such as this, where each story is really its own separate story. ( )