Neil Gaiman

I think my first issue of Sandman was Dream Of A Thousand Cats, if not Calliope. A friend of mine brought it back from the States for me and when I read it that was it, I was a Sandman reader and a Neil Gaiman fan for life. The stories of Dream Country were each like a bomb going off in my callow young head, explosions that propelled me simultaneously deep into the world of the comic and out into the more abstract realms of the possibilities of imagination, genre and form. In short order I'd show more picked up collections of A Doll's House and Preludes And Nocturnes, and was counting the weeks and days each month, waiting for the next issue to arrive.

Sandman opens with the imprisonment of Morpheus, Lord Of Dreams, by an English occult society in 1916. They were hoping to trap death but got her younger brother instead. It doesn't work out terrible well for anyone, least of all the occult society, but also the unfortunates who fall victim to a sleeping sickness that steals most of their lives, or for Morpheus himself, not to mention the vague efforts the universe makes to replace him with pale imitation superheroes. In 1988 he escapes, takes revenge, returns to his crumbling kingdom, and, with some difficulty, recovers his stolen tools.

It's all in there, in these early issues, but it's such a mess. Sam Keith's art is great, but not really in keeping with the book. Gaiman seeds all sorts of themes and elements that will be built on and expanded later, but issues go from genre to genre, until the book truly finds its voice in issue eight, the legendary Sound of Her Wings, which introduces Death, in a story about how everyone hates her and loves Dream, even though she's lovely and he's not. The multi-layered little story shattered comics into a million pieces, captured a million hearts and is the emotional and conceptual foundation stone of the whole epic. It's in stories like that, the stand-alones, that Sandman deepened and enriched its world and its mythology, even as the longer arcs drove the plot, often extremely obliquely, forward.

The Dolls House is a fantasy/horror masterpiece, building to the chilling and mischievous Collectors, which is itself about fear, and mythologising and demythologising it, self-mythologising and self-aggrandisement, and murder. Lots and lots of murder,

The Absolute Sandman Volume One is a big, beautiful object. The stories printed on larger pages of high-quality paper, recoloured, retouched. It includes back matter such as Gaiman's original proposal, all the afterwords to original collections, and the script of the astonishing Midsummer Night's Dream issue. So many of these stories were so astonishing. I'd forgotten just how astonishing they were.

Sandman was groundbreaking and earthshaking, and it blew my tiny mind, and this gorgeous edition is blowing it all over again. show less

When I saw Neil Gaiman had written a new version of the old fairy tale Hansel and Gretel on Netgalley, I was excited to see what he would do with. Happily, at least to me, he stays very close to the original. This is no Disneyfied version, no friendly animals or dancing candlesticks there to help the two children. Gaiman, instead, retains all the elements that gave me shivers when I read it as a child - war, famine, two children abandoned by their parents, and of course, cannibalism. Yikes! show more

And adding to the horror of the tale are the amazing stark ink drawings by Lorenzo Mattotti, the black colouring relieved only by patches of grey and white. In the end, though, both Gaiman’s usual excellent prose and Mattotti’s drawings emphasize the truth of all fairy tales that no matter how dark, grim and frightening the world can become, there is always hope and the chance of a happy ending.

I received an arc of this book from Netgalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review show less

This book is a delight, definitely in the top tier of the 12 Doctors, 12 Stories novellas. Neil Gaiman's televised Doctor Who stories have been mixed at best ("The Doctor's Wife" was pretty good; "Nightmare in Silver" probably set back the potential of the Cybermen and didn't make much sense to boot), but this is nearly perfect. The eleventh Doctor and Amy discover that someone has bought up every residence on Earth (legitimately), leaving no room for its people, who all die off, leaving the show more Earth free for some aliens to take over. Gaiman does a good line in creepiness (the aliens all wear animal masks, and go under names like "Mr Rabbit"), Gaiman captures the performances of Matt Smith and Karen Gillan extremely well, there are lots of great Doctorish lines (the Doctor suggests a lack of gazpacho in 1984 would be cause for alarm), and there are some nice references to things the show established after Series Five (like Mels and the War Doctor). A perfect little novella, and probably the best work Neil Gaiman has done on Doctor Who. show less

There is so much truth in this book, both explicitly and implicitly. It reminds you of what it was like to be a kid, when you didn't stop to question everything, you just accepted things the way they were and moved on to more pressing matters. So, your neighbor has been eleven years old for a really long time, and the pond behind her house is actually an ocean. Well, cool, then. That's how it is.
And then, after long years that, in hindsight, feel like minutes, you don't really get how a pond show more can also be an ocean. It doesn't make sense, because you've forgotten what it's like to truly believe in something. Your adult mind cannot comprehend it.
This book makes you feel like a kid again, if only so briefly. Personally, it was a nice reminder to not let myself become a true adult even if I'm 80 years old (it's always been a fear of mine, to become an adult both inside and out and forget what it's like to be a kid), to not lose that sense of wonder, to always enjoy even the smallest things, like a nice home-cooked meal, and to not forget to enjoy those things.
Sure, this is a fantasy book: it involves something that appears to be some sort of magic and it involves monsters. But the beauty of it is that is also very real, even in the middle of such strange, unexplicable things, like having a wormhole in your foot. I suppose this book speaks of what all fantasy books should: it speaks of truth, right in the middle of all the nonesense.
I love that none of the fantasy elements were actually explained. We don't really know if the Hemstocks are actually witches, we don't know how their magic really worked... we just know it did and we went along with it. For me, I usually need those kind of explanations so I don't feel like there were loose ends; I usually need the logic of it all explained. I didn't, for this book. The way it's narrated, I honestly felt like a kid, when the logic of something isn't what matters most. What matters is that it's real and it's happening and we should act accordingly. An adult wouldn't have been able to live what this kid did, not in the way he did, anyway. An adult would've made it so so complicated, trying to wrap their head around the whole thing. But, when you're reading this book, you forget what age you are and you feel like you're seven and some really weird shit is starting to happen to you because you simply had really bad luck that one day and made that one crappy decision.
I don't think any other book has made me feel like this before. And then you finish reading it, and you feel older than ever and so nostalgic, and so sad because who knows how many amazing things have happened to you and you've forgotten them as you grew up?
This was my first time reading Neil Gaiman, so I don't know if you always feel like this when you read his books. I kinda hope you do. show less