Product Description

This collection of tales tells of travellers caught in the vortex of a "reality storm". These wayfarers come from throughout time, myth and dreams to converge upon a mysterious inn, there to share stories of the places they have been and things they have seen, beside a flickering fire.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11009 in Books
• Published on: 1995-06-22
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 168 pages

Customer Reviews

Genious.
Six different tales, all linked by the common thread of being told by people trapped in a mysterious inn. While they can be read alone, each story enlightens or adds mystery to the Sandman mythology as a whole. Seemingly throwaway comments, such as Petrefax in his tale stumbling into a strange room and being asked by an unseen person "Which of them has died?" can be read, with knowledge of what comes later as a clever hint at the future, as can the whole reason behind the storm keeping the guests trapped. This was the last book of the ten I read due to it's unavailablilty. It is to Neil Gaiman's credit that not reading this had no effect on my ability to understand the books that came later, but once i read it my eyes were opened to other parts of the mytholog that i hadn't realised before and made me enjoy the last few books even more. Just buy it!

Grab a drink, take a seat, and tell us a tale...
Travellers from different planes of reality are caught in an unseasonable storm and are forced to wait it out in the World's End Inn. To make the time pass quickly they each tell stories.

You get a story of madness and claustrophobia set in a city; a story told by a Sandman regular, Nuala's brother Cluracan, and his tale of what happened when he went as an ambassador of Faerie to the outer cities to settle a dispute; a story set at sea with another Sandman regular, Hob, with smacks of Treasure Island and Moby Dick; a kind of Twilight Zone story of a brilliant young man who becomes President of the United States; and lastly a story of death set in Necropolis, the city of the dead, told by dead-looking undertakers.

This is a book like Dream Country (volume 3 in the Sandman library) that stands apart from the series and is really a collection of highly readable, highly imaginative stories. Stands apart that is until the ending where you are shown the reason why there is such a violent storm going on.

Stephen King says in his introduction (and I'm distilling it here because he does go on a bit) that he loves stories. I too love stories and to me Sandman has always been about just that. Sure it's about the Sandman himself, Dream, Morpheus, Lord Shaper (he has many titles) but it's also about dreams themselves and the weird stories we dream about. World's End is representative of all the brilliance and originality of what I think the series is about.

Not a new idea but one well done.
I have to admit I found a few of these tales trite and suprisingly unoriginal. However the ones that include charecters from previous books and the central theme itself - a portent that shows Gaiman knew what he was doing well over a year in advance to the end of the Sandman itself - is undoubtably excellent.

Though at times the Sandman series smacked of extending the series and avoiding the main plot simply for the sake of it, when Gaimans on form noone, in any genre, can beat him for pure storytelling.

One for the collection. But better off with the Dolls House or Brief Lives if your new to this.