The Sandman: Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, Kelley Jones...
Title: The Sandman: Season of Mists.
Author: Neil Gaiman.
Artist: Dave McKean, Kelley Jones, Mike Dringenberg, Matt Wagner, Malcolm Jones III, P. Craig Russell, Dick Giordano, George Pratt, Steve Oliff, and Daniel Vozzo.
Genre: Fiction, literature, graphic novel, fantasy, mythology, romance.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: December 1990 - July 1991.
Summary: Ten thousand years ago, Morpheus condemned a woman who loved him to Hell. Now the other members of his immortal family, The Endless, have convinced the Dream King that this was an injustice. To make it right, Morpheus must return to Hell to rescue his banished love - and Hell’s ruler, the fallen angel Lucifer, has already sworn to destroy him.
My rating: 9/10.
My review:
♥ "Perhaps that is the ultimate freedom, eh, Dreamlord? The freedom to leave."
♥ In the high hall of Gladsheim the lord of the Aesir sits and waits for thought and memory to return to him. At his feet two wolves attend him. Lacking thought and memory, he could not even name them. The floor of the high hall is mud, scattered with rushes. He sits and waits, the Gallows-God, the one-eyed king of Asgard. There is a fluttering of wings. The ghost-birds return to his shoulder. And instantly he knows; he knows all they've seen. Huginn and Muninn: thought and memory. And he smiles, the Lord of the Gallows. The mead he drinks is not the mead of the Aesir. It is his mead, brewed by dwarfs from dead Kvasur's blood; a draught of liquid verse and madness. It is the mead of Odin, the All-Father, and none but Odin may drink of it. He drains the goblet. And he is gone.
♥ "What about all the rest of them? Do you think they'll ever have to go back to hell?"
"Go back? I don't know. I think hell's something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go. ...They're doing the same things they always did. They're doing it to themselves. That's hell."
"I don't think I agree. I think maybe hell is a place. But you don't have to stay anywhere forever."
♥ The flames of hell, Remiel mused, had become refining fires, burning away the dross and sin, laving only purity and repentance and good. Remiel heard the screams, and it smiled. Perhaps (it thought) it had been guilty of misjudgement.
After all, this was all part of the plan, was it not? How could events not be for the best, in this, the best of all possible worlds? Perhaps things had ended happily, after all.
Happily ever after, in hell.
♥ October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale.
Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content." -The Man Who Was October by G.K. Chesteron/Library of Dreams.