World’s End
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FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY.Amazon.com Review
When Brant and Charlene wreck their car in a horrible snowstorm in the middle of nowhere, the only place they can find shelter is a mysterious small inn called World’s End. Here they wait out the storm and listen to tales from the many travelers also stuck at this tavern. These tales exemplify Neil Gaiman’s gift for storytelling–and his like for the very telling of them. This volume has nearly nothing to do with the larger tale of the Sandman, except for a brief foreshadowing nod. It’s a nice companion to the best Sandman fleeting tale collection, Dream Country, (and it’s much better than the hodgepodge Fables and Reflections). World’s End works best as a collection–it’s a tale about a tale about tales–all wrapped up in a structure that’s clever lacking being cute, and which features an ending nothing fleeting of spectacular. –Jim Pascoe
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Appealing structure to a series of tales told by travelers stuck at an Inn during a storm. Cantebury Tales was the inspiration and Gaiman employs many levels of tales within tales and even eventually brings the tale full circle, which is cheeky. But it seems that the tales were agreed small precedence and therefore come off very weak. Now part of this is expectation. Fables and Reflections blew me away and may be my fav of the series so I expected this as a series of individual tales to be just as excellent. So with it being just average I was overly disappointed. There are some excellent moments and the few appearances of Death and the Endless are captivating. But they are not enough.
One note: the end of this book overtly hints at the plot of Kindly One’s so if you want to be surprised, read this after that one. I wish Gaiman hadn’t done that, myself.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
It’s the first Sandman tale I ever read and that’s why I feel a bit out of place judging it. I’m reading Brief Lives right now too, but it seems like Sandman is beyond anything else in the industry right now. The Invisibles, Preacher and Sandman all have been cancelled so we’re stuck with shiny on these.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
The Saga of Morpheus continues in this Graphic Novel. Gaiman is the best. A co-worker’s 18 y.o. son is reading the series and he is blown away.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Telling tales is a lost art. Few do it well anymore, (although Anna Devere Smith and Spalding Gray come to mind) and Gaiman uses A World’s End to take a breath and tell some tales before the end of the Sandman series. A tavern in the middle of nowhere is the place to tell tales of Prez Rickard, the elf Cluracan, of a young “man” at sea and a world dedicated to the proper treatment of the departed. As with any collection of fleeting tales, some tales are more successful than others and one character even complains that they are all “boy’s own tales” simply variations on a theme. This is basically right and I admire Gaiman for having made this reference himself. They are tales to kill time before the next journey.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is one of the greatest comic books of all time. Alan Moore may have ongoing the comic-book-as-art movement, but Neil Gaiman made it more accessible by setting his tales in the common world of Myth. Sandman is the comic book that English teachers (should) like, a tale that blends both well loved and obscure myths and tales of Egyptian, Greek, and additional cultures into an entertaining tale backed by poignant and timeless philosophy.
That being said, I don’t like this book nearly so much as some of the others. “World’s End” centers on several travelers who find themselves unstuck from their native universes and they pass the time telling tales together. Like “Dream Country,” this is not a tale but rather a series of largely conflict-less vignettes, and I don’t delight in persons nearly so much as the mythic epics like “Brief Lives” and “Season of Mists.” In persons tales, there is a sense of adventure, but in these fleeting tale collections I feel like I am just witnessing Neil Gaiman ramble on about some weird thought he had, a thought that is intriguing but doesn’t really go anywhere.
This is of course personal inclination, but I reflect it is best exemplified by the “Prez” tale. Our narrator meets a man who tells her a tale about an alternate universe President of the U.S. This president was beloved by the people but learned that he was place in power by a guy named Mr. Smiley, who has a smiley face for a head. That’s pretty much the whole tale. For this pointless bunch of words to be blocked squarely between “Brief Lives” (a fantastic and thoughtful book where a name dies) and “The Kindly Ones” (a world-shattering book where a name else dies), I don’t know, I have to admit that I was kind of bored. I didn’t really know why I was being told the things that I was being told, and felt generally unsatisfied.
I like the end of “World’s End” very much, when we learn why these people have establish themselves at the end of the world, and when we learn what happens to them afterwards, but I didn’t much delight in getting there. I got this one out of the library, whereas I bought many of the additional ones, because that’s pretty much what it was worth to me.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5