When Hippolyta Hall’s young son Daniel is kidnapped, she slips slowly into madness. Assuming that Dream has taken him, she goes searching for the goddesses who loaned her their name when she was a superhero: the Furies. These three ancient figures of vengeance prefer to be known as the Eumenides, here roughly translated as the Kindly Ones. Though the Ladies cannot avenge the supposed death of Daniel, they can, and will, avenge Dream’s mercy killing of his own son, Orpheus. The Eumenides are not empowered to kill Morpheus, but to drive him to suicide….
Many characters from the run of The Sandman make a reappearance or get a reference somewhere in the course of this book or the next, right down to a pair of dreamers who served at the feast in Season of Mists. In a symphony, the last movement draws on themes from all the previous movements, and so Gaiman does here.
So here is Rose Walker, once a vortex, who was baby-sitting Daniel when he was kidnapped. Here is Zelda the Spider Woman, facing her own transience. Here are Thessaly, and Hob Gadling, and Alexander Burgess, Mazikeen and Lucifer, Clurican and Mab, Loki and Puck, and a new Corinthian. Like Delirium when Orpheus was about to go to his rest, they pop in long enough to say “hello” and “goodbye.” Some do a little more….
The Kindly Ones is a tragedy. My Theater History professor used to say (quoting, I assume, but I don’t know whom) that a tragedy is where everybody who needs to, dies by the end. And, depending on your definition of “needs to,” I suppose that happens. Neil Gaiman, in his introduction to Endless Nights, says that he was asked to summarize the plot of The Sandman in twenty-five words or less. This is what he came up with: “The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision.” And, in the end, that’s why he needs to die. He needs to shed his life and move on, because he can’t change enough. Partially for himself, and partially to make way for a new Dream, one who can change, and who can be what dreamers need him to be.
This is the longest of the ten volumes of The Sandman, comprising thirteen monthly issues. The story is intricately constructed, echoing other stories and itself again and again. It was never really designed to be read as a monthly, and so upset a lot of readers at the time, with its iconographic, impressionistic style of art (provided by Messrs. Marc Hempel, Richard Case, D’israeli, Teddy Kristiansen, Glyn Dillon, Charles Vess, Dean Ormston, and Kevin Nowlan), its peculiar continuity, and its lack of reintroductions. Gaiman knew when he wrote it that it would be collected, and he wrote for that book.
If you’ve read far enough in The Sandman to read this book, then I have no doubt that you’ll enjoy The Kindly Ones. But be ready to cry.
(Vertigo, 1996)
