creekhiker 's review for:

The Sandman Vol. 2: The Doll's House by Neil Gaiman

4.0

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This is a much darker, closer to horror, type of graphic novel than I would usually read. There is such violence in the book, sadistic murder, rape, portrayals of evil, and I would usually stop reading. There is too much real violence in the world to make sport of it in literature, and I am always suspicious of rape within literature, especially rape written by men. It is too often gratuitous and not true, too quickly recovered from, too quickly brushed off, and too often used as a short cut of showing a bad man, or a wounded woman. As I write that, actually, I still agree with that assessment somewhat for this book, or actually, rather for the next book of the series, that I am just now reading, and so I will write more of that in that review. For this book, I liked the play with myth-telling and story-telling in the opening comic. I can't actually write much more about this book because I left it at my office since I'm going to use some of those ideas and scenes from that novel in my Intro to Lit class, but I'll try to come back and jot a few more ideas later.

Read this again 10 years later and I like it more this time. Still incredibly difficult to read, especially “The Collectors,” but also so beautifully imagined and written.