I spent about a week reading a book that should have taken me maybe two days, and all because I was trying to avoid its end. It’s just, I’ve read Sandman before, and I knew how The Kindly Ones was going to come out. But despite the fact that the reveal at the climax of World’s End had already sealed said outcome, and despite the fact that probably books don’t change themselves around to tell different stories while I’m not reading them, I’ve spent all week hoping that maybe I’d get to the end and it would be different after all. There’s no need to keep you in suspense: for this time, at least, it was not.

The Kindly Ones is structurally and all but literally a Greek tragedy, and between that reveal I mentioned in the previous volume and recognition of the structure, the outcome will be as inevitable to anyone reading it for the first time as it was to me on this, my first reread. It’s a skillfully constructed piece of fiction, liberally flavored with themes of loyalty and duty throughout. And, of course, revenge. All Greek tragedies are about revenge, though. About revenge and about causing, through one’s own actions, exactly that which one was trying to prevent. Loyalty and duty and revenge and directed irony. And unrequited love. And all manner of other things that also go right to the heart of what it means to be human. I guess what I’m saying is that it impresses me that either 1) we are so strongly affected by the literature of our millennia-gone forebears or 2) that the people who were creating some of the earliest literature of which we have record already understood the things that affect people the most. Or 3) that my flaw as a reading enthusiast is being all Western-centric without even realizing how narrow my view is. But let’s assume it’s not that one and move on.

I respect the book for what it accomplishes. I hate it for how it turns out. But the entire series is about the act of dreaming and the nature of dreams and the ways that they can make people better than they ever were (and sure, the ways they can reveal people as worse than we could ever imagine, too; we’re still talking about human people, after all). And so I love the book too, because it lets me believe that, like a recurring nightmare, the next time I experience it still might come out differently than it did this time. Really, how many books have that kind of power?