My quest to complete reviews for books I read back in April is almost complete. Soon I will move on to May! And then perhaps June, and July. (Ughhhhhh.) My memory on this one isn’t the best, but I remember liking it. Not very much Morpheus, except for hints and cameos (and foreshadowing! What the fuck, Gaiman, just give away your sad plot, why don’t you??) A lot of the stories I liked more than others. There’s a ton of stories within stories action here, also, so that’s fun.
The main gist of this one is that there’s an inn between worlds, or inn at the end of all worlds (no one is quite sure), where you can rest for a while for free, in exchange for stories. Like the Canterbury Tales, the main bulk of this collection are stories told by the characters. There are ostensibly five, but there’s actually more than that if you count the stories within the stories. There’s also a frame story, involving a couple of co-workers sharing a drive to Chicago, when they are caught in a surprise snowstorm in June, and a large, strange animal runs them off the road into a tree. A hedgehog directs them to the inn, and the stories commence from there.
The thing about this series, and this volume in particular, is that it rewards readers who are much more meticulous than I am. There were so many cameos and hints and returning characters that I did not register at all, and only know about because I read a wiki pointing it all out. I’m sure there’s more I missed. I’ve just been reading this series so piecemeal over the last couple of years, it’s not ideal for catching what I should be catching. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have doled them out slowly, but binged them. I’m definitely doing that on my inevitable re-read.
I was tickled to learn, however, that Prez Rickard (the teenage President of the United States) was a real DC character that Gaiman was riffing on. That was my favorite story in the book, incidentally.
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