REVIEW: The Sandman 5: A Game of You – Neil Gaiman
This is the first long-form Sandman story that doesn’t break in between for a short, breather tale. It’s a different style from Book 2: The Doll’s House which was probably the last one that was so dark and intense.
The Sandman 5: A Game Of You by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
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A Game of You is a connecting story from the first half to the second half of the Sandman arc. At another, more in-your-face level, it’s a fantasy tale, set in the mind of Barbie (whom we first met in Book 2: The Doll’s House). A mythical land, magical creatures and a mysterious villian called the cuckoo populate this tale. The bizarre side of this tale comes from dreams seeping into the real world with the neighboring geek-girl turning out to be a crusading witch, the loser next door as a spooky agent of the enemy and everyone else just a blind follower in the melee.
It’s hard to explain why this book falls on the low for me while the other Sandman books vie for top billings. I’m not a huge fantasy fan and in the visual/textual format, it feels too much like a kid cartoon. The story though, is gristly enough to make me feel slightly sick. To top it all, the hard gritty narrative is not even tempered with a shorter, lighter tale as with the other stories.
I didn’t like this book much and on my most of my re-reads of Sandman, I prefer to skip over this tale. Still, it is a part of the Sandman arc and contributes in its own way to it. Characterisation, a strong feature of the Sandman saga, continues here in the form of Thessaly(who got her own standalone story in ‘Thessaly: Witch for Hire‘) and the lesbian couple, Hazel & Foxglove/Donna (who also featured in another breakout story, the very sweet ‘Death: The Time of your life‘).
Read this one, if only because it provides continuity to the next Sandman episode and since it leads the reader into two other great books.
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