The main characters are: Charlene Mooney, Brant Tucker, Klaproth, Cluracain, Jim (only he's really a girl named Peggy), and Petrefax. We don't know why there is a reality storm, but if we read Brief Lives (and we did), we can surmise that the reality storm might have something to do with Dream having killed Orpheus. The basic plotline is that a large group of travelers are stuck in an inn at the Worlds' End (a place where all the worlds end) because there is a reality storm. Still the book is about him, and that becomes clear at the end of The Kindly Ones. Dream is in most of the stories, but not all. They were produced monthly, and every once in a while, it must be nice to buy your comic once a month and have the story actually be self-contained. Worlds' End is another collection of stories. Perhaps he knows when all the events take place, but it would take a thesis to figure out the timeline for The Sandman. One of the introductions mentions that Gaiman is meticulous about time, but I really beg to differ. Oh the perils of blogging out of order once the plot thickens! My first thought about this book is that it is out of order! Haha, what I mean to say is that the events in this book take place after the events in the next book. Show More obviously, I still need to finish my blog on Brief Lives, so one thing at a time, eh? It’s also the best looking Sandman book yet! This is still not one of my absolute favorites of the series, but it’s pretty damn impressive as a structure, with it’s Russian doll theme of stories within stories, and it’s playing on it’s theme of the halt, the wait, the pause for thought.

I think I felt, the first time around, that many of these stories could’ve been better. And indeed, like the role of this book, an intermission in the big arc of Morpheus. Their stories aren’t ended, merely halted, like their lives, and like the role of the inn itself this stormy night. Most of these tales don’t end with bangs or final twists, but kind of halt at a point where they point forward. Or perhaps, and this is more important, for being a book about storytelling, it has a rather irreverend way of looking at them.

Possible because the book is a pause in the big story arc of Sandman (even though there are, as usual, important pieces to the big story here too), or because I read it out of order. Rereading it now I can’t quite understand why. I remember this as one of the weaker volumes – I think I’ve only read it once before, even.

Sandman the world's end