Malcolm Polstead and his little canoe get in a lot of trouble, all over a little baby delivered for safekeeping to a nearby abbey. The baby is Lyra, daughter of the dangerous Lord Asriel, and the secret forces of the repressive regime are after the baby, Malcolm is determined to keep her safe.

Written in an almost unusually slow build, taking time to create the characters and the setting, it is an absolute masterpiece of plain, crafted prose that flows like a river, so the read is effortless and the reader is drawn in completely until the waters rise and we are plunged downriver on the terrifying flood. Utterly brilliant.

Many people will finish watching the recent season of Twin Peaks and feel no particular need to go seeing supplementary material - let the ambiguities and mysteries and perplexities be their own reward. Others might say, well, just as David Lynch is a superb director, so Mark Frost is an excellent novelist, so why not dip in and see what embellishments he has to add?

Final Dossier is not as epic in scope as the previous volume. Mostly it fills in blanks left by the series regarding the fates and activities of the characters between seasons, and hints about afterwards. (Hinting that there is an afterward is a pretty big thing in itself.) Many are fraught and tragic because this is Twin Peaks. Some are quite, if not happy, then satisfying. Some are puzzlingly unstatisfying, one can only assume by design, since this is twin peaks. Some only add to the perplexity. And one or two are hapy. I'll say no more.

Its a quick read, it might add to your enjoyment, it probably won't detract, but it might provide some narrative solidity to the surreal mysteries. With that in mind, choose for yourself if that's your thing.

This didn't end up being what I expected - I thought it'd be more like Children Of Hurin, a single long narrative. Instead it seems to be something a little more stitched together from older versions of Beren And Luthien, and most of it verse which, it turns out, Tolkien was pretty good at. It makes for a choppy read as Christopher Tolkien bridges narrative gaps with earlier or later pieces or fragments, so it doesn't really form a whole and ends up being something framed by the usual careful and respectful scholarly exegesis of Tolkien's composition. Still, pretty readable and fairly enjoyable on the whole, but I think the narrative in the Silmarillion might be more satisfying as a read.

It's only January and already I've had my head wrecked by this monster, chewed up and spat out by its sharp multi-layered convolutions. In a future British State of total surveillance, a woman dies under interrogation. An Investigator looks into the case, but in reviewing the interrogation - which involves one's entire life being scanned via invasive brain-reading machinery - she discovers not one life but five, and as she immerses herself in a a series of increasingly impossible stories that may be a kind of camouflage or may be a kind of trap, we find ourselves on a deep dive into human consciousness and identity, not to mention ideas of freedom and the consequences of technological innovations.

It's a big, dense, intense, sprawling book, and the one where Harkaway completes the transformation from the clever-clever silly-satirist-with-a-heart of The Gone Away World to something terrifyingly literate and intelligent, grappling with enormous ideas that he inserts carefully into our heads so they can cause all sorts of trouble.

Three men and nine boys are landed by boat on a remote sea stack on the archipelago of St Kilda to spend a few weeks catching the numerous sea birds who roost there during the summer. The boat does not return. As the days and weeks pass the truth of their abandonment slowly dawns on them. Surely only the end of the world could have causes this. The rest of the people of St Kilda have been taken up to heaven, but the angels don;t know where to find them. Gripped by a terror that's as much spiritual as it is physical, with the cold of winter setting in and their store of birds dwindling, the boys struggle to survive perched together on the sheer rocky cliffs. At first Quillam's stories keep flagging spirits up, but time and hardship and religious fervour slowly erode all sense of hope.

A riveting, harrowing, sometimes funny, always gripping read.

Hild, niece to the king, intelligent, well-informed and observant has a knack for seeing how things will work out. To fully capitalise on her talents she is obliged to play the role of mystical royal seer, fudging the lines between signs sent by the gods and logical conclusions derived from observable phenomena. It's a fine line and a grueling, dangerous life, walking the tightrope of keeping the king happy and keeping her growing household safe and protected without over-reaching or over-playing her hand.

The world is richly and immersively evoked, the daily life and activities of men and women, natural landscape and homely settlements and royal halls, the commerce and the politics, and in particular the epochal arrival and spread of Christianity. I was very favorably reminded of Dorothy Dunnett.

I like the way William Gibson writes and I like the way he seems to think, or at least the way presented through what he writes, about the present and the past and the future, about technology and culture and society. These are short, mostly sharp essays. One is flabby and too long, one is a rerun of another, which Gibson does draw attention to in his little afterwords. They're all really good about expressing the confluence of various impulses at any given moment in the world and hazarding some careful thoughts about where they will go next.

I think my first issue of Sandman was Dream Of A Thousand Cats, if not Calliope. A friend of mine brought it back from the States for me and when I read it that was it, I was a Sandman reader and a Neil Gaiman fan for life. The stories of Dream Country were each like a bomb going off in my callow young head, explosions that propelled me simultaneously deep into the world of the comic and out into the more abstract realms of the possibilities of imagination, genre and form. In short order I'd picked up collections of A Doll's House and Preludes And Nocturnes, and was counting the weeks and days each month, waiting for the next issue to arrive.

Sandman opens with the imprisonment of Morpheus, Lord Of Dreams, by an English occult society in 1916. They were hoping to trap death but got her younger brother instead. It doesn't work out terrible well for anyone, least of all the occult society, but also the unfortunates who fall victim to a sleeping sickness that steals most of their lives, or for Morpheus himself, not to mention the vague efforts the universe makes to replace him with pale imitation superheroes. In 1988 he escapes, takes revenge, returns to his crumbling kingdom, and, with some difficulty, recovers his stolen tools.

It's all in there, in these early issues, but it's such a mess. Sam Keith's art is great, but not really in keeping with the book. Gaiman seeds all sorts of themes and elements that will be built on and expanded later, but issues go from genre to genre, until the book truly finds its voice in issue eight, the legendary Sound of Her Wings, which introduces Death, in a story about how everyone hates her and loves Dream, even though she's lovely and he's not. The multi-layered little story shattered comics into a million pieces, captured a million hearts and is the emotional and conceptual foundation stone of the whole epic. It's in stories like that, the stand-alones, that Sandman deepened and enriched its world and its mythology, even as the longer arcs drove the plot, often extremely obliquely, forward.

The Dolls House is a fantasy/horror masterpiece, building to the chilling and mischievous Collectors, which is itself about fear, and mythologising and demythologising it, self-mythologising and self-aggrandisement, and murder. Lots and lots of murder,

The Absolute Sandman Volume One is a big, beautiful object. The stories printed on larger pages of high-quality paper, recoloured, retouched. It includes back matter such as Gaiman's original proposal, all the afterwords to original collections, and the script of the astonishing Midsummer Night's Dream issue. So many of these stories were so astonishing. I'd forgotten just how astonishing they were.

Sandman was groundbreaking and earthshaking, and it blew my tiny mind, and this gorgeous edition is blowing it all over again.

And here it is. Season Of Mists was the first Sandman storyline I was in on from the start. By now I'd read Doll's House in collected form, and the stories in Dream Country in their issues. It would be a while yet before Preludes And Nocturnes got collected, but I didn't appreciate then what a neat piece of writing the summary at the start of the Doll's House collection was. I was thrilled to see Mike Dringenberg back on art - I'd formed the idea of him as the definitive Sandman artist, but i wasn't to know he was only doing the prologue and epilogue. I didn't love Kelley Jones' art, but I wouldn't deny his artistry, and of course we also got Matt Wagner for that unexpected boarding-school story, complete with Death in jogging get-up trying to cope with the sudden influx of dad people.

Season Of Mists sets out the overall theme of the whole Sandman epic had we but eyes to see it. A lord of a domain gets fed up of his responsibilities and decides to quit. As simple as that. Of course, Lucifer is not a good person and once he makes up his mind he goes ahead and does it, never mind the consequences. Morpheus, though, we are reminded, is not a good person either. A good person does not sentence a woman he loves to thousands of years in hell because she rejects him. But because he has changed, once this has been pointed out to him, he tries to, belatedly, do the right thing. it is this new-born sense of a right thing and the seriousness he treats his own responsibilities that makes what Lucifer does unthinkable for him. Nonetheless what has been set in motion will have consequences, not all of them good or fair. Rules and consequences are hugely important in Sandman, and they can seem arbitrary, unfair and even evil to people caught up in them. Dream might have improved in some ways since his imprisonment, but he is not always a nice person, nor would he want to be.

A Game Of You reinforces this idea. Barbie, lost and adrift in new York, her identity shifting, dreamless while the Cuckoo takes over the world she created. The Cuckoo does terrible things, but is not evil - it's dangerous. She is what she is. Like Thessaly and Dream, she doesn't change and acts according to her nature, unlike Barbie and Wanda, who are shifting their identities in different ways. But we know Dream has changed too, ins spite of himself - and what does that imply?

So the evil villain of the story gets what she wants and escapes having done terrible things. Meanwhile, because of seemingly arbitrary rules of Thessaly's witchcraft, Wanda remains in the apartment to face the storm. How can any of that be fair? It isn't. It's just the way things work out. There will be more of this.

All of these are thoughts on rereading the series from the start (so far) for the first time since it came to an end. I don't know if I ever reread the whole thing in one go - my copy of Season Of Mists isn't on the shelf, maybe I was waiting to replace it before tackling it from the start. Who knows? I get the impression A Game Of You isn't the most popular story in the Sandman epic, but I like it a lot, in part because it seems to grow out of Barbie's unexpectedly rich, vibrant and beautiful dream in A Doll's House, but Colleen Doran's reworking of part three, which was, frankly, terrible in the original issue, is a revelation, and the whole story reads beautifully in one sitting, though you have to roll your eyes at the fates of the trans and the black character, which sticks out a mile now.

The stand-alone stories are uniformly excellent. I love the historical tales, particularly Thermidor, a real favourite for me. Johanna Constatine trying to smuggle a head out of Revolutionary France at the height of the Terror. Genius. (For some reason the issue didn't ship to my comic shop and I never got a copy and it was long time before I read it - it might even have been after the Orpheus special came out.)

Also here are the Death and Sandman galleries, a Desire story drawn lividly by John Bolton, the story that accompanied the Dream statue and the script for an issue of Season Of Mists, in which Gaiman remarks offhandedly that Lucifer deserved his own comic. Mike Carey went and proved him right on that count.

I started being diligent about reviewing the books I read here as a form of diary. I've never been vey good at diaries but I do like writing about books, and I tend to associate books with the times and places I read them. I regret that I was a bit slow about including graphic novels, but that's neither here not there. So I'm prefacing this review with a remark almost entirely of interest to none but myself.

The reason for the gap between the review of volume one in this series and the subsequent volumes was because volume three and four arrived from the library weeks ago and volume two only arrived the other day. I'm not complaining, I'm amazed and delighted to have them, even of only on loan, and I'm delighted that they're out there in the system for others to enjoy. I was searching for a copy of Overture, actually, when I came across the Absolutes in the system and promptly decided that it was time to read the whole series. Volume five is there too, but, apparently, 'for library use only.' Since it consists of ancillary stories, and the main story ends in volume four, I'll get by without it for now.

Anyway, yay libraries, as Lucien would no doubt agree.

Onto Brief Lives, then, the longest story so far. Delirium decides it's time to find the lost brother of the Endless and ask him to come back. After some toing and froing, Dream, on the rebound from a break-up, goes along with her, half as a distraction, half in the hopes of running into hos lady-love, whoever she may be. Throughout the series it has become apparent that Dream is his own worst enemy or his own best friend, depending on how you view things. Certainly he is making decisions that lead to certain inescapable conclusions all the while insisting that he's doing them for other reasons and he hasn't really changed at all. Their search sets of events which damage and destroy certain lives, and this actually bothers him. In order to find his brother he has to make a certain sacrifice. Why does he do it? His sense of obligation and responsibility has broadened, perhaps, or he has become aware of blind spots and gaps in his approach to them, and maybe this is the breaking point. It's all there now, all ready to go. What's next is inevitable.

After Brief Lives comes Worlds End, more masterful stories, including the great Wolfe homage and big sign saying SOMEONE IS GOING TO DIE which, in case you were slow on the uptake, is followed by a massive vision of a funeral. Artists include Mike Zulli, and there's another cruel but lush Zulli story right at the end. The script for Ramadan is included, and it's possibly the least informative of all the scripts, except to compare it to Russel's gorgeous execution of the story and the layouts is stunning.