Sandman: Dream Country

Neil Gaiman

Steve Erickson, in his prologue to this third installment in the Sandman series, says he really revs things up in book four. I'd have to disagree; having read both (in fact, I finished the fourth book in the series the night before writing this review), it seems to me that Dream Country is, by a hair, the better of the two books.

Dream Country takes us away from the main storyline of the Sandman tales a bit and gives us four stories that tangentially touch on Morpheus himself (plus a script for the first of them, which is a great behind-the-scenes look at how one of these things gets made). "Calliope" starts things off on a rather ugly note, the story of a one-hit novelist who's desperate for another book. Through an acquaintance, he comes into possession of the muse Calliope. "A Dream of a Thousand Cats" is the second, and the name pretty much tells you all you need to know. "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which won the World Fantasy Award (giving, according to Harlan Ellison in the introduction to volume 4, a number of fantasy and sci-fi writers something approaching apoplexy), tells the story of how the Kingdom of Faerie is invited to a performance of a new William Shakespeare play; "Facades," in which the Dream king doesn't even make an appearance, is about what happens to superheroes once they retire.

What Gaiman has created here is more than just a graphic novel (actually, collection of graphic short stories). These contain some of Gaiman's finest work in any genre; it's easily the equivalent of American Gods or Coraline. If you're a Gaiman fan and have not yet been exposed to the Sandman books, even if you don't plan to read the rest of the series, read this.