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Title: Dolls House
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| CONSUMER ADVICE |
Parents, the violence is slightly relaxed here, but you should still keep your kids away. The other option is to read this and then decide on suitability. There is some child abuse, some nudity, and a convention for murderers. Fantasy fans only read if you’re not queasy about serial killers and what people dream. Horror fans whom like both thrillers and fantasy horror should search for it. |
If you’ve read the first Sandman book, you must be thinking, “What was Neil Gaiman doing?” I didn’t have that reaction until the second book. But even if you haven’t felt that “what the heck” feeling yet, you will somewhere in the series. Sandman is like XXXholic or Bobo-Bo-Bobo-bo (not the manga- the anime series on Cartoon Network that makes as much sense as a ballerina at a football game); it’s so bizarre that it’s very hard to describe without either sounding like an idiot or bursting in laughter. Yet I’ll do my best to describe it and not sound like an idiot. Since I understand Sandman (and I’m a fantasy writer too, so don’t think of me as a psycho), it’s only fair that I try to convey the same thrill I receive from reading it. Doll’s House is about many things. It’s about a girl named Rose Walker who’s learned that her mother was the daughter of Unity Kincaid, the woman who fell asleep and got pregnant in Preludes and Nocturnes. It’s about how Rose searches for her brother Jed and encounters a kindly old man named Gilbert.
It’s about Dream trying to prevent a disaster and rounding up rebellious servants. It’s about serial killers meeting at a convention to discuss that they don’t kill for money or for lust, but because they want to. (Eerily, this mirrors the reason why most writers write: because we have to.) It’s about how nothing is what it seems, and people aren’t what they appear to be, not even the ones we thought we knew the most. But most of all, it struggles with the question of whether we control the Endless as dolls, or whether they control us as dolls. Either way, it’s creepy, cool, shocking, poignant, and philosophical. There’s filler in the middle of the story that slightly kills the mood, but that is only to exist to set up a subplot for several volumes. The same is with a subplot involving Jed and this woman named Hippolyta Hall, and even the prologue doesn’t get concluded until volume four. I honestly think that the filler story and the prologue killed, or would kill the tense mood that Gaiman set up. But hey, everyone isn’t perfect. And this was only his next eight or so batch of issues. He finally devotes an entire volume to fillers, but that is not to exist until Dream Country, which is not the subject of our review.
I’m just going to put it bluntly: I like everything. The ideas, the execution, the art (as fantastical as the first book), the characters- like I mentioned in the Consumer Advice, this was Gaiman’s best Sandman arc so far. Even the filler is okay and worth reading. Preludes and Nocturnes was too jittery to give a vibe, so this refreshing multi-layered saga was well accepted into the mind of a frustrated comic book reviewer. There’s even some literary devices used here: Gilbert tells Rose an early version of “Little Red Riding-Hood”, and that tale parallels a later scene, dialog and all. Panels are angled well, and if there were any discolorations, then I didn’t notice them. The nudity in one dream sequence could’ve been handled well, but I’ll excuse this fallacy since it was technically a dream. But next time the artist should be more accurate! Let me explain the concept behind the killers’ convention: you know about conventions like Comic-Con where comic book fans who can make it go to meet fellow comic book fans, writers, and artists? This convention is basically the same thing with killers. Everyone uses an alias like The Boogeyman, Grass Widow, The Corinthian, Dog Soup, Fun Land, or The Doctor. They see violent movies, have panels about murder, and talk basically about how they started or what they do. Leading them all is the Corinthian, who assures them that what they are doing is not wrong or immoral, but instead glorious.
Some people at the convention don’t believe this and they’re trying to look for help with their violent desires. Some have arrived to simply mix and mingle with each other. Anyone who is not a true killer, as the book demonstrates, will be thrown out. (Actually, “thrown out” is an understatement.) It’s an original and simple idea, but when executed well, it screams its own brilliance. More ideas appear throughout the story, old ones mixed with new ones, and yet it doesn’t matter if they’re original: what matters is how they’re executed. Some stories, like One Piece, for example, don’t have the most original premise in the world, but with wacky characters, a bizarre setting and the best humor you won’t find in the newspaper, they become classics. Other stories, like Annie John (a novel, by the way, not a manga), start out with interesting ideas but then become more of descriptions rather than well-constructed stories. Some of the best fantasy novels out there are by Diana Wynne Jones, who combines original ideas with brilliant execution and humor.
Er, where was I? Oh yes, talking about Doll’s House. Preparation is much like it was for the first book with an introduction by Clive Barker and an afterword by Neil Gaiman that turns into acknowledgements. But it doesn’t matter that there are little extras, as the story makes up for it. The graphic novel in hardcover costs about $30, but nowadays you can just request it from your local library and not worry about money. Doll’s House is not a story for the weak-hearted Tolkien fans, but for the people who read Inuyasha and XXXholic and watch movies like Princess Mononoke. In short, Neil Gaiman was thinking about anime fans. One day I should write him an email and thank him for writing Doll’s House as it made me think and gave me a thrill to read as well. I should also thank him for not making the story give me nightmares. Toning down the violence was a bright idea.
- -Review By Jaya Lakshmi - -