I wonder if I should ought to break out of my rhythm and read the Lucifer books more concurrently with each other than I have done. After this most recent four month gap, I’m starting to feel more and more like the narrative has grown too complex for me to not keep the series more firmly in mind as I read each new story. Exodus, just for example, took me fully two-thirds of the book to get much of a handle on. The exodus in question is ordered by Lucifer himself, who, having seen the way that the various immortal/ancient beings in Yahweh’s universe of his birth have variously conspired against their God and now seek to replace Him in His absence, decides to rid his own universe of such backstabbing treachery. I suppose there’s no small amount of irony in that goal. And so the main part of the book is a series of stories about various immortals in each universe and how they have responded to both the originating event and the subsequent edict.

What struck me as interesting is how this is the first book in the series that has shared a structural hook with the Sandman series that gave it birth. Although many Sandman books followed a main plotline in which the Lord of Dreams reached certain conclusions about the nature of his existence, many were only stage-dressing in which Gaiman got a chance to tell various unrelated short stories through the lens of bit players that briefly or tangentially touched upon the lives of one or more of the Endless. And Exodus, you see, was like that, mostly told through the prism of Lucifer’s trusted[1] lieutenants (Mazikeen the Lilim, Michael’s daughter Elaine Belloc, the cherub Gaudium, and others) on their quest to enforce the, you know, exodus of the immortals. Of course, there’s only one place to send them, and in His absence, it appears that Yahweh’s universe may be experiencing a shelf-life.

[1] Well. Reasonably well trusted, for all of the unlikelihood of that claim.