The Doll's House

Neil Gaiman Sandman: The Doll's House (1990)
I went bananas for the Sandman comics when they first appeared but by issue twenty - give or take a few - I was dutifully buying it each month mainly just in case it got interesting again, which it didn't. I grew to dislike Neil Gaiman's writing more and more. It feels like something done to a formula with an awful lot of the readers' buttons being pushed, although beyond this admittedly vague impression, it's difficult to really say what doesn't work for me. It feels obvious somehow, dull and bereft of surprises, except I can see the art in what he does, and even appreciate that it is art, and the man clearly knows what he's doing*, so maybe it's just me.

That being said, the early issues of Sandman still retain some of the magic to my way of thinking, and it may be significant that Gaiman has come to regard the first issues as awkward and ungainly. The art was, I thought, fucking terrible - all huge heads and leering boggle-eyed faces presumably in homage to those fifties horror comics but otherwise looking amateurish and rushed; but the story was such that it didn't seem to matter. The Doll's House continues to explore and reconfigure the mythology introduced in the first issues but with significantly improved art, and seemingly represents the pinnacle of this book, at least for me. This is the one featuring - among other things - a serial killers' convention, an idea which should have fallen flat on its stupid arse but somehow works and conveys genuine horror whilst slipping in an unexpected and pertinent commentary on transgressive narratives in general. It's probably no coincidence that the fictional publisher of Chaste, for example, shares initials with the real-life publisher of Pure - and I'd strongly advise against looking that one up on Google for what it may be worth.

The Doll's House is properly gothic - disturbing and quietly horrifying for the right reasons and told with wild flourishes of imagination and invention rather than rearranging grim clichés in different but vaguely familiar sequences for the edification of self-harming teenagers.

Of course, it couldn't last. We've already met Death incarnate as the generically cute gothic girl you can't quite work up the courage to talk to, and someone has a Cure poster on their wall in one of these issues, and William bloody Shakespeare turns up for a couple of pages with tedious inevitability; but just for a while, this thing was still worth reading.

*: The above was written about eighteen months ago, before we also knew what Neil was doing. As my opinions regarding his work remain unchanged and I never had a particularly high opinion of the guy in the first place, I'm posting this as it stands without further comment, aside from that parallels to the fictional publisher of Chaste suddenly seem even less of a coincidence.