I feel like I might be missing something here. I liked reading this but it wasn’t my favorite of the Sandman comics, and I don’t get the rapturous praise for it. I think some of my reaction may be again that I have read this series so spread out and I’m not making the connections with previous characters like I should. Some of it is also probably that it’s not just vibrating on the right frequency for me. Shrug.
This is the climax, the denouement of the story started back in the first volume. A bunch of threads (ha!) are tied together here as it all builds up to a quiet moment near the end of the book. It just didn’t hit me very hard. (Another problem was that I didn’t feel any sympathy for Lyta Hall. Her insistence that Morpheus was responsible for everything seemed delusional. I guess I just wanted a more righteous presence to play the role that she did, though her wrongness and incidental-ness in Dream’s periphery seems to have been part of the point.)
This volume was loooong. I think it might be the longest single comic volume I’ve ever read. I’m glad I didn’t have to wait between issues; I would probably have lost patience with what would have felt like endless (ha!), pointless, drawn out conflict.
I am saying very little about this drawn out volume, and feeling a little underwhelmed by the ending to this story. Apparently #10 is more of an epilogue.
Oh, well. Maybe I will feel differently on re-read. Next time I’m definitely reading all the volumes back to back.
