The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Sandman, Vol. 10: The Wake by Neil Gaiman

In The Sandman, Vol. 10: The Wake, Neil Gaiman accomplishes one of the rarest feats in modern literature: a true conclusion that feels both inevitable and yet profoundly surprising. It is a work of closure that neither diminishes the grandeur of what preceded it nor succumbs to the easy sentimentality that often mars final chapters. Rather, The Wakeserves as a luminous coda to a grand mythopoetic symphony, echoing with the sorrow, tenderness, and mortality that have undergirded the entire Sandman series.

At its heart, The Wake is an extended meditation on death—not just the act of dying, but death as a communal event, a narrative necessity, and, paradoxically, a source of renewal. The story follows the wake of Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, whose death was prophesied and whose legacy reverberates across realms both fantastic and mundane. Gaiman’s portrayal of grief feels deeply literary; the gathering of diverse figures (gods, faeries, nightmares, and mortals) around a fallen titan evokes classical funerary epics like the death of Hector in The Iliad or even the ritual pageantry of Shakespearean tragedy.

Artistically, the volume’s illustrators—particularly Michael Zulli, Jon J. Muth, and Charles Vess—bring an almost sacramental beauty to the proceedings. Their brushwork softens the edges of reality, allowing the narrative to shimmer between dream and memory. Faces are rendered with a vulnerability that prose alone could not convey; there is a sense of “waking,” not into harsher reality, but into a subtler, more poignant realm of emotional truth.

Gaiman’s writing here exhibits a maturity that transcends genre. Where earlier volumes delighted in labyrinthine plots and baroque invention, The Wake pares back, embracing stillness and silence. Dialogue becomes ritualistic, and the reader is asked to linger not in anticipation of what will happen next, but in deep reflection on what has already occurred. It is telling that the most powerful moments arise not from action but from conversation—quiet exchanges weighted with ancient pain and newfound understanding.

Symbolically, Dream’s death—and his successor’s birth—represents the inevitability of change, the death of old selves, and the strange continuity of identity. Gaiman subtly reminds us that even endless beings are not immune to narrative evolution. In this way, The Wake acts as a mirror for its readers, inviting them to mourn, remember, and ultimately move forward.

Some critics might argue that The Wake lacks the dazzling plot complexity of earlier volumes like Season of Mists or the subversive horror of Preludes and Nocturnes. However, to critique it on such grounds is to misunderstand its function. This is not a climax; it is an elegy. Gaiman is less concerned with resolution in the traditional sense than with offering the reader a space to grieve, honor, and transcend.

The Sandman, Vol. 10: The Wake is a masterclass in literary closure. It affirms Gaiman’s place not just as a storyteller of great talent, but as a mythmaker whose work sits comfortably beside the epics, tragedies, and sacred texts that have shaped our collective dreaming. To read it is to attend not merely a funeral, but a birth—a ritual both intimate and cosmic in scale.

It is, in the truest sense, a wake: a mourning, a celebration, and a waking up.