The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review -The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman’s The Kindly Ones stands as a culminating crescendo within The Sandman’s labyrinthine mythos—a work of profound thematic gravity, narrative ambition, and emotional reckoning. In this penultimate volume, Gaiman fully embraces the ancient tragic form, merging Greek mythological archetypes with modern psychological realism to deliver a narrative that is as inexorable as fate itself.

The Kindly Ones centers on the Furies—ancient embodiments of vengeance—who are unleashed against Dream (Morpheus) following a tragic confluence of events involving the child Daniel Hall. Yet to describe the volume merely as a revenge tragedy would be reductive. Gaiman crafts here a meditation on guilt, responsibility, and the impossibility of escaping one’s own nature. Morpheus, who has spent previous volumes building, mending, and reimagining his dominion, now faces the truth that real change comes not from external acts but from internal transformation—an evolution he seems unable, or unwilling, to achieve.

Stylistically, The Kindly Ones departs from the visual lushness of earlier volumes; Marc Hempel’s art is stripped down, almost cartoonish at times, emphasizing emotional expression over intricate detail. This abstraction paradoxically deepens the reader’s engagement with the material, pulling the mythic into the personal. The art style mirrors the way memory and myth themselves operate—distorted, simplified, yet intensely vivid.

Gaiman’s prose in this volume is particularly resonant. Dialogue flows with a fatalistic cadence, interspersed with moments of startling tenderness and sharp irony. Characters from earlier arcs—Lyta Hall, Loki, the Corinthian—are woven back into the tapestry, giving the narrative an almost orchestral complexity. Every thread feels purposeful, every voice a note in an overarching symphony of loss.

What elevates The Kindly Ones beyond a mere climax, however, is its philosophical depth. Gaiman interrogates the nature of storytelling itself—Dream, after all, is not just a character but an idea: the manifestation of narrative, memory, and imagination. His downfall is not merely the result of external enemies but of his own inflexibility, his self-conception as a figure bound by cosmic duty rather than personal desire. In this way, Gaiman invokes the classic tragic hero—Oedipus, Hamlet, even Prometheus—whose virtues are inseparable from their fatal flaws.

Thematically, The Kindly Ones is a study of motherhood, vengeance, and grief. Lyta Hall’s descent into madness and retribution mirrors the ancient tragedies of Euripides and Aeschylus, while the Furies themselves—both literal and symbolic—act as agents of narrative closure. They are not villains; they are inevitabilities, the very forces of consequence.

Reading The Kindly Ones is a paradoxical experience: deeply sorrowful yet strangely cathartic. It is a reminder that even the gods of our imagination are subject to time, to sorrow, and to change. By the volume’s end, readers are left not with a simple conclusion but with a reverberating sense of elegy—a mourning not only for Dream but for the intricate, fragile worlds we build within ourselves.

In sum, The Kindly Ones is Gaiman’s masterpiece within a masterpiece: a fearless and sophisticated exploration of storytelling’s power—and its costs. It demands not only to be read, but to be reckoned with.