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A review by trilbynorton
Death: The Time of Your Life by Neil Gaiman
4.0
"I think some of it is probably contrasts.
"Light and shadow. If you never had the bad times, how would you know you had the good times?
"But some of it is just: if you're going to be human, then there are a whole load of things that come with it. Eyes, a heart, days and life.
"It's the moments that illuminate it, though. The times you don't see when you're having them...
"They make the rest of it matter."
I enjoyed this a great deal more than the previous Death story, The High Cost of Living. That didn't work for me in part because, unlike Dream, Death is a character who seems to have undergone her own arc in the long agos of the history of the worlds and is pretty much done growing by the time we encounter her throughout the Sandman series.
Here, though, like her brother in many of the stories told throughout the Sandman comics, Death isn't really the focus. Instead, her presence is the locus around which the human characters revolve as they grapple with the Big Questions.
I still think these spin-offs are minor constellations surrounding the galaxy that is the Sandman series proper, but The Time of Your Life at least approaches the quality of its progenitor's lesser stories.
"Light and shadow. If you never had the bad times, how would you know you had the good times?
"But some of it is just: if you're going to be human, then there are a whole load of things that come with it. Eyes, a heart, days and life.
"It's the moments that illuminate it, though. The times you don't see when you're having them...
"They make the rest of it matter."
I enjoyed this a great deal more than the previous Death story, The High Cost of Living. That didn't work for me in part because, unlike Dream, Death is a character who seems to have undergone her own arc in the long agos of the history of the worlds and is pretty much done growing by the time we encounter her throughout the Sandman series.
Here, though, like her brother in many of the stories told throughout the Sandman comics, Death isn't really the focus. Instead, her presence is the locus around which the human characters revolve as they grapple with the Big Questions.
I still think these spin-offs are minor constellations surrounding the galaxy that is the Sandman series proper, but The Time of Your Life at least approaches the quality of its progenitor's lesser stories.