Okay, so, Brief Lives wins. Damn. That was good shit, from beginning to end.
It helped that there was a very strong narrative revolving around a clear, well-defined goal (I think this is a reason I preferred Doll's House to Season of Mists): find Destruction. What also helped is the team-up of Death and Delirium, who just happens to be fucking hilarious. Nearly everything she says in this book is totally awesome. I love that she speaks in funky colors. Her childlike mentality is even funnier in contrast to Dream's dour demeanor. And sometimes she's so adorable I want to smush her.
There's also a lot of great character stuff in here, as we get a real sense of the siblings' relationships with Destruction and what he meant to them. The Sandman, ultimately, is about family. And I think Gaiman nails the complex relationships that exist between siblings of different genders and ages.
As a sidenote, Gaiman fails at the complex relationships that exist between mortals in love. Nearly every dealing with romance comes off as very clichéd, and thankfully, there isn't a lot of it. He fares better with the immortals, though, and I love that the fact that Dream got dumped again serves as motivation for him to go on this journey with his sister, to distract him, to take his mind off her, whoever she was. That rings true.
I am a complete moron for not recognizing Destruction the first time we see him with Barnaby. His pages even end with a line about family, and what I didn't see at first was that the room with the pool had all the damn sigils. I was supposed to have figured it out then. Instead, I clued in on the family the second time he appeared, and I let out an audible "Oh my God." Because it was so fucking perfect that when Destruction quits, he embraces creation, in the form of art. Painting, poetry, cooking, etc. And I was glad that Gaiman never really spelled that out for us, which made me feel smart for picking up on it.
I wonder where the hell Barnabas the Talking Dog came from. He gets special lettering.
I love that Dream is so unwilling to recognize that he's changed. Even though it's clear by his actions that he has, he doesn't want to accept it.
It's interesting that Destruction left because of science. Because of the rise of the Age of Reason. It makes "Thermidor" more thematically relevant. I'm not particularly sure why that spurred him to leave, though Peter Straub, in his afterword, seems to interpret it as his being unwilling to participate in the sort of destruction that science would herald. I saw it more of a reaction to what he talks about at the end, the fact that the Endless are really just anthropomorphs cooked up by humanity, and a focus on reason threatens their relevance. It's as if he quit so that he wouldn't be fired.
Also, nice to see the Corinthian again.
Ever since I read Siddhartha, I've been fascinated with the concept of duality, so I of course loved the recurrence of that theme throughout the story.
I didn't expect Destruction to come back, really, and I wasn't sure what to expect from the penultimate issue, but I think it ended up working for me. What Dream and Delirium needed was closure. Dream, whether he'll admit or not, was there when Destruction was deciding to leave, and he probably blamed himself a little for not stopping him. Delirium needed to know he was okay. It was time for a check-in, after three hundred years.
Then Dream kills his son, not out of malice but out of love, a love he'd probably deny feeling. And I don't know Desire swore this oath that he'd shed family blood, but now he's done it, and she didn't even have to do anything.
Brief lives. A strange term to use around immortals, or even long-living mortals.
Random questions: what the hell is up with Dream's helm? Why does it look so weird? It makes him look like an alien. Why did Delight turn into Delirium? Why did Despair become Desire's twin? What Endless was destroyed? Who are Mary Canby and Chloe Russell?
Looks like the world ends in the next book. What fun.