Review by Jay Ferguson

Warning: This review spoils Volume 9, or at least you can read between the lines pretty easily to the plot point in it which is about the only thing in the series that can really be spoiled, so if you haven't read that you might not want to read this.

I love the Sandman, mainly because of the great stories with layers upon layers of meaning, as well as how it is one of the few things that has actually brought me to tears as well as to uproarious laughter. Volume Eight is my favorite of all the volumes, because each story is great in its own right, and the whole arc is a set of nested stories, some of which have one or more stories nested inside of them as well. It starts with the story of a man and a woman who are traveling from Seattle. They aren't really friends but they are driving together, sharing a car so they don't have to pay for airfare. It's the middle of summer, but it starts snowing, and the man has to swerve to avoid a strange beast that crosses the road in front of him. The car gets wrecked and they have to walk to the nearest building, which is the World's End Inn, where they meet Cluracan the elf, a centaur and many other strange folks. They find that it's not actually a snow storm, but a reality storm, and the people in the inn tell stories to pass the time. All the stories are great, and include Cluracan's story of his work as an ambassador to a group of human nations, the tale of Prez, the teenage president, one of the strangest characters that DC has ever published, a tale of a young seafarer who meets Hob Gadling, an important character in the Sandman mythos, and the boy himself is more than he seems, and a story of a man who gets lost in the dreams of a city. The best story of the bunch to my mind, is "Cerement", the story of a young man who is learning how to be the best undertaker in a giant necropolis that preserves the funeral traditions of all the world's cultures. The young man is made to attend a sky burial, which is dismembering a corpse and feeding it to birds, which is used in places where burial, cremation and river burial are not possible, like Tibet. At the close of the ceremony they eat and tell tales as a part of the ceremony. Though you may not realize, one of the stories talks about the death of Despair, which was alluded to in an earlier part, and foreshadows the fact that the Endless can actually die in some sense, but that they still remain. The end of the arc focuses on the man from the beginning of the story, as he watches the end of the storm, with an enormous funeral procession, where we see the Endless, with Morpheus strangely absent. Death and Delirium bring up the end of the procession, and the man talks about falling in love with Death as he sees her pass by. That moment just brought me to tears. If you haven't read it, its not something I can really explain. Overall, I'd say that this is the best Sandman volume in my opinion, because each of the many nested stories is great in its own right, as is the story arc, but it is very important to the overall Sandman storyline as well. It may not be a great starting point, but once you get to it, I think you'll understand why it's my favorite even if it may not be yours.