Like the Dream Country collection, the sixth volume of Sandman trade paperbacks, titled Fables and Reflections, is an anthology of single-issue stories written by Neil Gaiman, set in the realms of Morpheus.
Fables and Reflections is a wider-ranging collection than Dream Country, compiling stories a bit out of sequence from their original release order. We get, for example, some stories in this volume originally released before A Game of You, some immediately after, and then others, like “Ramadan” from Sandman #50, that came out a year after the others. That makes it a more eclectic batch than we saw in Dream Country, and, I would argue, a less successful grouping. Some of the stories in this volume are very good, while I found others difficult to read through this time. Not all of them have aged well, and while Gaiman was surely fond of exploring different facets of his dream-time mythology, and pulling from histories and other books and stories to do so, he’s not great at making it all equally compelling. Such is the nature of anthology-style collections, even ones with a single author.
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