Last year, I spend quite a few weeks with 10 volumes of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comics. The Sandman: The Dream Hunters is an expansion of that universe, set in ancient Japan. It tells the story of a simple Buddhist monk and shape-shifting fox, who learns of a plan to destroy the monk’s life. With the help of the King of All Night’s Dreamings, she then has to use all her cunning to save him.
Unlike the original Sandman-comic series, The Dream Hunters is told in prose, accompanied by the paintings of Yoshitaka Amano. It’s not exactly something I’d hang on my wall, but some of them, like the one above, definitely got something going for them.
And Gaiman’s words? Well, they’re as smooth and beguiling as anything else I’ve read by him.
- Book read
- Neil Gaiman & Yoshitaka Amano — The Sandman: The Dream Hunters
- First Line
- A monk lived in solitude beside a temple on the side of a mountain.