A reality storm is coming! Look for some safe place! Creative Team:Writer: Neil GaimanIllustrators: Mike Allred, Gary Amano, John Watkiss, Mark Buckingham, Shea Anton Pensa, Tony Harris, Vince Locke, Steve Leialoha, Dick Giordano, Michael Zulli, Alec Stevens & Bryan TalbotCovers: Dave McKeanLetterer: Todd Klein EMPERORS AGAIN, CITIES AGAIN, BUT THIS TIME ALONG WITH… GRAVEdIGGERS, FAIRIES & SHIPS Pictures and word-balloons don’t mean dumb. That first quote isn’t from the pages of the volu

Normally I don't care much for the one-shot stories that pop up in seemingly every other volume of Sandman. But these were really entertaining for me.Thre's some sort of Inn called World's End and travelers from all times and places end up there because of reasons.And (of course) everyone tells their stories. Not necessarily stories about themselves, just the most interesting story they have. There's usually some vague connection to Dream in the stories but they aren't about Dream. This was (for...

Storytelling is such a fundamental aspect of human nature; it is how we connect with each other and how we make sense of the world and the people in it. Stories can tell us so much and the right one, the right one can totally change your life.Gaiman touches on that here; he touches on the transformative power of stories: he celebrates them in there many varieties. Some stories are similar, told differently by different people across different times and cultures. And, for me, this is the most imp...

This eighth entry in the series is, like Dream Country, a collection of individual tales only tangentially connected to the characters and concerns of the series. Gaiman, in a brief afterward, tells us that he crafted these stories to take advantage of the talents of some of his favorite artists, and in this he has succeeded admirably. The visual styles are pleasantly varied, and many of the individual images are haunting and memorable.The tales are presented to us through a Decameron style fram...

Re-read 8/8/20:*shiver* That end. Oh, that end.Original Review:And so we get our first taste of the infamous House of Mystery, the harbor at World's End, where safety and drink in the limbo between dimensions can be bought with the price of a tale.I'm pretty fond of these short stories, but perhaps not as fond as I was the first time I read them. They're solid and thought-provoking, but not overly so.I suppose what really got to me was the end of the volume. The wake. *shiver* Okay, that was som...

Worlds' End is the 8th volume in The Sandman series.It's about stories that people tell inside of a story. Ha!If that seems confusing to you, then just read the volume.Neil Gaiman brings all the weird in this volume of The Sandman and I was all about it.After a car crash, our traveling pair (Brent & Charlene) find themselves at an inn called The Inn of the Worlds' End. No joke.When you end up at this inn, all types of magical, regular, and strange folk will be there.They're all staying safe from...

What do you get when you wrap stories inside of stories featuring people in the stories telling stories about the people telling stories in the other stories? Neil Gaiman at his Neil Gaimaniest. This series continues to delight (and occasionally confuse), even when, or perhaps especially when, it veers away from what is loosely the main narrative. This volume is no exception, and we can go ahead and add World’s End to the list of fantastical and imaginary places I desperately want to visit, whic...

Reread 11/20Original 11/14 review, edited after rereading:Stephen King's introduction is really useful for understanding what is going on in this volume, where the brothers and sisters of the Endless Family play a minimal or background role. As King says, the stories in this volume are like nesting dolls, Russian Matryoshka dolls, stories within stories within stories. The model for the setting is a kind of fantasy Chaucer's Tales, a bunch of people and creatures thrown together at an inn that i...

A group of strangers all end up in an old, hidden inn/tavern to seek shelter during a storm. The storm appeared differently for each: for one it was a snowstorm in the middle of June while driving somewhere in the U.S. Midwest; for another it was a violent thunderstorm while at sea.....in 1914. The tavern is packed with people from different realities and timelines (including non-human creatures from Faerie and myth), and the only thing to do while they wait for the "reality storm" to end is swa...

[9/10]Brief Lives proved to be a hard act to follow. I found myself re-reading some of the single issues in this following album in order to fully enjoy them, after an initial lukewarm reception. I was sucked back in after a while, as connections with the overall plot become evident, and as the framing story linking together the individual tales ended with a promise of troubled times ahead for the Endless.This framing story is a familiar device, of strangers seeking shelter from a storm and pass...

This 8th volume in the series was full of stories. Stories told by different people from different worlds and realms being stranded in the Inn at the End of the Worlds. A storm has swept through the realities, thus also landing co-workers-on-a-roadtrip Charlene and Brent at the inn (with the help of a hedgehog), where many creatures managed to find refuge in the inn and now they all need to kill time until the storm is over.The stories told to do just that tell of sea serpents, girls trying to p...

Not my favourite, but still plenty to enjoy! Some stories were better than others in this anthology.

Gaiman pays homage to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, being from across reality find themselves stranded at an inn during a reality storm. There they all tell stories to pass the time. Gaiman resurrects the obscure character of Prez in one, from a short lived DC comic from the Seventies. He's went on to get a few more comics since. The gut punch though is the final story where we see why the reality storm is happening. When I was reading the original comics back in the Nineties, we'd heard word at t...

4.5 stars

As much as I love this series when the plot really gets going, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the pacing in Sandman is awful. There's all this stuff going on in the main story and it takes this full volume to interrupt itself and tell me a bunch of random short stories I don't really care about. I know they tie into the main story in many ways but I can't help but feel like these sort of volumes completely destroy any forward momentum the main plot about Dream has going. World's End isn't...

There is a place, a realm, that exists between the waking world and sleep. Dreams dance through it, although they don’t really live there. You can never entirely remember it and the harder you try the more nebulous it becomes. You can never entirely remember it but you can never quite let it go, either. Come and spend a couple of hours there with Neil and the Dream King. They’ll tell you I hung there for a while. They’ll tell you I laughed, they’ll tell you I cried, they’ll tell you I drank more...

“Sometimes big things happen, and they echo. Those echoes crash across worlds. They are the ripples in the fabric of things. Often they manifest as storms. Reality is a fragile thing, after all.”This was a fascinating volume where I quickly got drawn into the various stories being told, getting to the point where I was so focused on those that I mostly forgot to wonder about what was happening, why everyone was there, what was this big thing that had happened? Perhaps I also didn't want to think...

Sandman: Vol 8: Worlds' End: "The Golden Boy" is a bittersweet fable of leadershipAfter Vol 7: Brief Lives, which focused on Morpheus’ dysfunctional family and a road trip in search of Destruction, Vol 8: Worlds’ End is another stand-alone story collection similar to Vol 4: Dream Country and Vol 6: Fables and Reflections. Once again the Endless retreat to the corners of the stage, making way for a cast of characters gathered at the Inn at Worlds’ End to tell tales to while away the time during a...

The first time I read this trade paperback, I went straight to the story pages, completely ignoring the wonderful Stephen King introduction. It was his thoughts and praise on Neil Gaiman and his work on Sandman that would make it worthwhile to pick this trade, even if you already have the issues that comprised this arc. King wrote in his introduction that Gaiman’s work was a filling meal even if it was served in bite sized chunks in a short story collection like this trade or as longer arc that

Για τη reality storm, για την κηδεία και για το βλέμμα της Death στο τέλος. Φοβάμαι λίγο για το τι θα ακολουθήσει. -What's a reality storm? I mean, it does sound like something from Star Trek or something.-Well, sometimes big things happen, and they echo. Those echoes crash across worlds. They are the ripples in the fabric of things. Often they manifest as storms. Reality is a fragile thing, after all.I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn't that dumb? But it was like I knew her. L...

3 and 1/2 starsThe blurb on the back states that this volume is in the tradition of The Canterbury Tales, but The Decameron is a more apt allusion. The storytellers aren't in a villa waiting out the Black Death; but they are in an inn, seeking refuge from a mysterious storm (or storms) that has deposited each one of them there: perhaps they too are facing Death.I wasn't engrossed in any of the stories until I arrived at the tale of a necropolitan (yep, he lives and works in a necropolis). And wh...

Reread on 12/21/21++++++++++++++++If on a winter’s night in June a traveler finds himself seeking shelter from a reality storm at the Inn of the Worlds’ End, then stories will be told, such stories as are hardly heard in the waking world where we live, stories which again support my contention that Neil Gaiman is the Geoffrey Chaucer of our day and that The Sandman is the finest graphic novel that I have ever read.I suppose after a long career of teaching The Canterbury Tales, I could draw some

Breaks my heart to give a Sandman volume a low score but I did NOT like this volume. With the exception of the Prez storyline I found a lot of these "Stories" kind of boring. Sure, they all have to do with Dream or one of his family members in the end but a lot of them are just kind of dull. Maybe I just didn't care for the actual stories the characters were telling. The art itself was great, and you got to see different styles and lifetimes so that was cool but I couldn't get into any of the st...

Man. This is where Gaiman shines. An in where the end of every world meets. And people from multiple worlds telling short stories and spinning short yarns about people telling stories about people telling stories. It's haunting and curious and wild and mythic and everything that makes Gaiman great. The best of Sandman is this sort of story. The worst is how threadbare the metanarrative is. He's meta without metanarrative. I see that as a problem, actually.But it's not in this volume. This volume...

"World's End" is Gaiman's homage to the Chaucerian concept of people at a gathering place, usually an inn, telling stories from their own perspective. It was done in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales",but has also been done in sci-fi classics like Dan Simmon's "Hyperion".A strange car accident lands Brant Tucker and Charlene Mooney, co-workers, in the "World's End" Inn (a nod to the Adams Resturant at the end of the Universe? Just saying). There among a strange group of supernatural beings, each perso...

So this starts with a couple driving along a motorway and in the middle of June (English Summer) it starts snowing. They veer off the road and crash. When they awake they are lost and see a pub to get help. Inside are several other travellers from different realms. The pub is called the World's end. None of the travellers know how they got their and they find out that the pub is at the end of all worlds. The Inn keepers says they must tell stories to pass the time and to keep away the evil spiri...

I wish this story never ended. This time I could forgive even the lack of Morpheus.

One of the top three in the series so far for sure. (In my own opinion anyway)

I didn't think I would like this collection as well once I realized that it was more short stories or whatever. But luckily my contradictory nature kicked in again! These stories worked fairly well for me. I still miss my peeps, but a few made appearances here, so it wasn't all wasted. What I especially liked was the story-within-a-story thing going on. It was done artfully (for lack of a better word). We're not talking Boccaccio here or anything, but similar to that or, as Stephen King says in

I think I like this volume best. The way the storytelling is structured from start to finish is enjoyable and simply pulled me into the flow. This has been one of The Sandman volumes that I couldn't put down once I started. My favorite story in this collection is Cerements, about a necropolis and its habitants who specialize in burials and prepare dead bodies for the final farewell. The contents are morbid but I find them very interesting. It reminds me of Mary Roach's book, Stiff (one of my fav...