I read a third of this last night with a mug of cider and a few chunks of coffee cake. I got up at five this morning and came downstairs to finish it. The house was dark and I didn't turn on the light in the living room because I didn't want to disturb the dog, so I felt my way down the stairs in my stockinged feet. The door into the bedroom opened and closed behind me, and I stopped, and waited.

'Hello?' I said.

'Daddy,' said a sleepy six-year-old voice right behind me

I wasn't mad keen on the idea of a sleepy six year old going down the stairs in the pitch black of an early winter morning, but I couldn't go past him to get to the light and leave him alone, so together we went slowly downwards in our stockinged feet.

Nicky sat at one end of the table while I filled the kettle and prepared the porridge and made my coffee, then I sat down at the other end with my pot of coffee and a cup and Sandman volume four.

'We must be very quiet,' said Nicky. 'We mustn't make any noise or we will wake Martin and he will be cross.'

Martin's a sort of lodger. He's very nice and I don't think he'd get cross, but Nicky was right, we must be very quiet.

I started to read.

I think Neil Gaiman wrote at night a lot, so it felt appropriate to be reading this at five in the morning. There wasn't a storm lashing the windows with wind and rain, though I noticed later it was foggy, but that was later. I didn't notice Nicky go back upstairs. I was vaguely aware of Eddie getting up and moving around upstairs. I didn't notice the morning getting brighter, dimming the glare of the lights. At some various I did stir the porridge and turn the heat up and yell at the boys to come down and eat and for Eddie to walk the dog and I left the table long enough to take Annemarie's up on a tray and made some Van Morrison jokes.

('Have I told you lately that I love you?'

'Yes, but you haven't told me there's no-one above me.'

'...can't remember what comes next.'

'I fill your bowl with porridge? Take away your.... bowl... with no more porridge?'

'You make my breakfast that's what you do.')

Breakfast runs automatically now, and nothing spoils a morning read like burnt porridge.

So I finished it. I didn't want it to finish, but it did. Poor Lyta Hall. Poor Dream. Poor Clara. Poor everyone. It really was all about death, wasn't it? The story resolves in The Kindly Ones, but the real emotional climax is The Wake. Death and grief and loss and mourning and then waking up and moving on as best you can.

(At some point Eddie sat down to eat his breakfast and said: 'Oh, there's a hair in my porridge. Good thing it isn't a rabbit. Eh? Eh?')

I seem to remember Marc Hempel's art not being popular with everyone. I may have been unsure of it myself at first, but God, it's amazing. And Mike Zulli on the wake, and John J Muth and then holy moley Charles Vess reprising older, wiser, sadder Shakespeare in The Tempest.

The unresolved mystery of who Puck and Loki were really working for lingers. None of my own theories really fit properly, and I guess I appreciate leaving one thing unknown and possibly unknowable to haunt and nag the reader. I do hope it has a solution though - if there was no solution to the mystery, even if we never discover what it is, that would be a cheat.

I think reading The Sandman may have been the one thing I ever did that was cool, and I didn't do it because it was cool, I did it because I loved it, and it became cool for a while. I'm not sure anyone noticed me doing this cool thing while it was cool, but maybe that's what's cool about it.

I still have Overture to read, which I'll get to tonight, and then there's assorted extras like The Dream Hunters and the Death collection and Books Of Magic, which is only vaguely related, which I'll get to eventually. At some point I might try to write something about the whole series from beginning to end, but not now, which is why this review is mostly about me going downstairs in the dark in my stockings with my six year old son behind me like a little familiar spirit. I can go back and read Sandman again, but moments like that come and go, and I'd like to be able to recall it long after it would be forgotten if I hadn't written it here.

Try to remember things, and tell your stories, and be remembered.

It was with a certain dull dour melancholy that I anticipated reading this. I'm not sure if I was thinking that this would be the sad end of my Sandman reread or that this would be a dull echo of Sandman at its height, a sincere but pale, as it were, imitation. Holy guacamole. That didn't even last a single page.

To be clear, Gaiman does not let the reader down. This isn't a retread of Sandman at all, this is a whole different type and style of Sandman story. Morpheus is proactive, for a start, in a way he generally isn't in the long run of the series, and we get some sense of why that is. This is an epic, action-packed space opera, a huge conflict that Dream must fight with Dream's own weapons and tactics, and he does and it's a giddy delight. It's a prelude, but it draws back in a score of threads laid out in the main series and refines them into a fast-paced eye-popping wide-screen thrill ride.

Not just that, but the mythical world of the Endless is deepened and expanded - we meet Mum and Dad! We meet versions of Dream from all over the universe! We hear the story of Aliana (but weren't there three gods? Oh Gaiman, you minx!) There's a giant talking Dream cat! A western! A city of stars!

But galloping gondolas it's JH Williams who takes all the prizes, who elevates the whole thing to a level that surpasses almost everything that went before, except that's not fair because it's like none of the other stories that went before. The art flows and pops and bends time and space on the page. It stretches and bends and still manages to tell a completely coherent story. Literally the only problem with the storytelling using this amazingly complex and vivid art is that once or twice the glossy paper stuck and I skipped two pages by accident.

No dour melancholy or doubt can survive contact with these pages, from the giddy delight of long-laid plot seeds effortlessly flowering and clicking into place like some sort of clockwork mechanical growing flower things to the sweeping action and the mind-bending profusion of ideas and the brilliant colours and the teeming inventions of landscape and alien lives and impossible incomprehensible realms and Destiny saying 'what?'

This is an exciting, exhilarating, comic, an utterly new execution of utterly familiar characters and ideas that enriches what has gone before by prefiguring what is to come. Gaiman and Williams have completely outdone themselves, as have the colourists and the letterer and presumably the vast processing intelligences that fill solar systems with their whirring, god-like, editing brains. It's a fantastic high note to end the reread and I'm already anticipating a future return to the story with the Overture at the start to see how it reshapes and alters the story.

Having jumped through a rip in time out of a helicopter to escape flying.. things, the girls are stranded deep in the past. They meet a girl with a baby and three bad men who want the baby. They meet a scientists who has just made the very first journey through time and is regretting it on almost every conceivable level. Also, there are periods, giant sloths, kissing and flying boots. And this is most settled collection so far, though by the end everything is in chassis once more. Great writing, great art, great characters, wild story.

I was no more able to resist the sweet charm and allure of Gaiman's Death when she was introduced in Sandman all those years ago, than any other impressionable young person in their late teens, but now I'm older and it seems to me that the real lesson of this incarnation is that it doesn't matter how Death is presented - as a grim hooded figure or an adorable goth - they're coming just the same, so why not make them someone friendly and nice?

This collection actually includes two stories I hadn't read before, so that was nice. otherwise it's a quirky, atmospheric, thoughtful, sometimes chilling collection about life and death and Death and love and how one gives value to the others. That may not be our ideal vision of how things should work, but it is how it is, so it's as good a way of going forward as any. Great art, particularly Chris Bachalo's in the two mini-series. I remember the second one in particular taking ages and ages to come out, but here it is, and totally worth it.

A travel writer arrives at a tiny, once thriving Levantine city-state on the shores of the Mediterranean. She meets the people, sees the sights, evokes past and present through delicate description and historical anecdote, not always reliable, but even the stories are indicative of some aspect of the personality of the place. It is rich with culture and full of history, and yet it is an odd, elusive place, all surface, all smiles, hard to pin down, hard to truly understand. She will never understand the place. Her account is occasionally interrupted by odd little hints of things beneath the surface. They never coalesce into any real threat or danger or suspense, until the final pages, when with discreet and refined bewilderment she is ushered to the border, building to the incredible, subtle crescendo of the final line of Letters To Hav.

Hav, of course, is fictional, an invention by travel writer Jan Morris, who is also a character in this book. It is a 'hazy allegory,' but its true allegory is the difficulty of understanding a place. In Hav of The Myrmidons she returns, briefly, and discovers it transformed. It is more surface, louder, brighter, richer. And though she clearly prefers to withhold judgement and let people's own words speak for them, she cannot hide her frustration and even her anger that the changes have made the place even more hidden and ambiguous and secret.

A brilliant book, beautifully written, an astonishing piece of worldbuilding that hauntingly evokes modern dilemmas and confusions as much as it evokes a place.

Rachel, a scavenger in a destroyed city, finds a strange thing in the fur of a giant flying bear. She brings it home, and despite the misgivings of her partner, Wick, she names it Borne, keeps it, feeds it, and it grows and develops, and talks. It becomes her child, and like any child it must eventually grow beyond her and go out into the world, but she knows that her child, lovable and innocent and sweet, is a killer. Killing seems to be part of its fundamental nature. How can she love a killing thing? How can she let it loose on an already ravaged city? Can she even claim to have any control or authority over it?

With dangers closing in and driving them from their home, Rachel and Wick are forced on a journey to the heart of the Company that bred the giant flying bear, and who may or may not have bred Borne, but most of the secrets they eventually uncover are secrets about themselves.

A strange, powerful and evocative novel, of a strange kind of family somehow clinging together in a strange decaying world. Children in this are destructive: the bear's proxies, the feral orphans, Borne himself. Are they made that way by neglect or interference or inner natures or as a response to environment? Can they be helped or controlled or even survived? Can you forgive them for what they do? Can you forgive yourself? Can you help them? Can you help yourself? Can anyone fix a broken world?

A surreal story of surviving, and deciding to survive alone or together.

Charlie and Gil, tortured and washed-up and spiraling to oblivion in a haze of cigarettes and alcohol try to do the right thing - solve the murder and expose the horrible secrets of the studio. Their hearts are in the right place, almost, but they are their own worst enemies. It's a dark and sad and conclusion to a dark and sad story.

Afro-futurism is on the rise, and this polished, stylish meditation on personal and political power and responsibility as a strong and stable country is left reeling in the wake of a series of disasters feels like the complex SF/superhero saga you've been waiting for. Perhaps too thoughtful and careful to start off with? It can seem a little slow at times, even though it deals economically with complex situations and moral questions. A force is on the rise turning Wakandan people against their King, while two of his elite bodyguard go rogue after one of them is condemned for killing a corrupt and sexually-exploitative chief. T'Challa himself is beset by doubts at his own failures to protect his people and his sister, and his seeming inability to grapple with the growing chaos. This is a far cry from Christopher Priest's supremely confident strategist and tactician five steps ahead of friend and foe alike, and all the more likeable for it. (Must reread that run, it was a good one.)

The writing is polished, the art is incredible, the ideas and conflicts engaging, and yet somehow it feels oddly low-key, as if we're jumping into the latest chapter of an ongoing story written by someone who wants you to take the ideas seriously between bouts of fighting and fisticuffs - more of a political drama than a superhero action comic, such that some of the best and most engaging scenes are those quiet one that involve people talking - the two rogue bodyguards or T'Challa and his mother, primarily.

Haven't read a Christie in years, I forgot how enjoyable they are, tightly written, fast reads. There's a touch of meta here as an aging Poirot extols the virtues of various crime writers, but otherwise it's a fiendish and clever little tale about a ridiculously baffling murder, with some expertly deployed red herrings.

Sebastian Becker sets out to decide whether a rich old industrialist is mad and arrives just in time for two girls to turn up murdered. Another unnerving and atmospheric historical thriller from Gallagher.