The Dreaming

Gaiman, who is from England but makes his home here, works quickly and ranges widely across genres. Whatever he produces — from novels such as American Gods to smart and literate children’s books such as Coraline — is interesting and instantly snapped up by his adoring fans.

This fall, Gaiman is even more profligate than usual: Not only have Morpheus & Co. returned in the Vertigo/DC Comics graphic novel The Sandman: Endless Nights, but Gaiman also has published a new children’s picture book, The Wolves in the Walls. Expect Don’t Panic Gaiman’s biography of Douglas Adams (author of “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”), in November.

Seven years after his last Sandman tale, Gaiman teams with seven artists in “The Sandman: Endless Nights.” Each story focuses on Morpheus and his family of “brother-sisters”: Desire, Despair, Delirium, Destruction, Destiny and everyone’s favorite Goth-girl, Death. The Sandman series has always been a stockpot of sorts — a dash of horror and mythology here, a bit of fantasy and history there — it’s uneven but somehow together it works. “Endless Nights” is like that, too. Some of it is clever: “The Heart of a Star” imagines Morpheus attending a gathering of his family and large group of interstellar beings, including the stars themselves. Our own sun, Sol, is a clumsy kid among wizened red giants and other more mature stars.

Some of it is downright juvenile. Among the many nubile and naked nymphets tramping through Desire’s story is a sexy tattooed witch who just happens to enjoy eating sausages and suggestively licking her fingers. It’s just one of those campy things that pagan witch queens do, you know.

The best of the batch is “Going Inside,” a story that focuses on Delirium and is told in a series of insane interior monologues. It is a perfect pairing of artist and writer, a showcase of how deep the form is when it’s considered as art. Gaiman is restrained and allows Bill Sienkiewicz’s manic, moody illustrations to carry the story. Sienkiewicz’s art is a disordered melange of pencils and paints, inks and collage, both realistic and cartoonish. It is a graphic representation of crazy genius, and it’s unlikely that any pairing of these two would ever be dull.

Dave McKean contributed designs to “Endless Nights” and has collaborated with Gaiman on other projects, including Sandman covers and children’s books. The two are together again in “The Wolves in the Walls,” a picture book about conquering fears that may well instill a few, too. The story is about a girl named Lucy who hears noises, sounds that she is convinced are coming from wolves living inside the walls of her house. Unconvinced by Lucy, her family stays put.

Like [John] Grisham, he limits public appearances. But once he committed to Novello, he began talking up the event on his Web site. [Rita] Rouse, [a spokesperson for the Public Library of Charlotte] said ticket inquires for Gaiman’s event have been coming in from all over the country.

Why is Gaiman, author of children’s books, fantasy novels and thrillers as well as graphic novels, coming to Charlotte?

The first was the more light-hearted The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish. The Wolves In The Walls is darker and scarier, dealing with a girl’s nightmarish fantasy about a pack of wolves preparing to burst through the walls of her house at night.

McKean, the artist/designer of the partnership, says they didn’t intend it as a children’s book originally, and you can easily imagine it as a dream sequence in an adult movie.

In keeping with the tone of the story, McKean uses murky colours, browns, reds, ochres, and a variety of forms – painting, photography, collage, pen and ink – in his highly imaginative pictures. ‘Gaiman and I often improvise our ideas. If we disagree on the words he has the last say, if we disagree on the picture I have the last say.’

A former student of the then Berkshire College of Art, McKean started working with Gaiman in the early 1980s when they were lucky enough to collaborate on a series of graphic novels for DC Comics in New York. He has since worked in many areas of graphic design, including album covers and posters.

You can tell that you’ve made it as a writer when your name on the cover is bigger than the title.

Neil Gaiman is one of those writers, as evidenced by the cover of his latest book, The Sandman: Endless Nights.

He’s earned it.

Not only is he a New York Times best-selling author (for his novels American Gods and Coraline) and a highly regarded writer of children’s books, but he’s won the Hugo, the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker award. Writer/creator of the BBC’s fantasy mini-series Neverwhere, when budget constraints and pedestrian direction hobbled his original vision, Gaiman turned around and transformed his scripts into a bestselling novel.

But comic book fans will know him best as the biographer of Dream, the member of the Endless known as the Sandman. Literate, whimsical, horrifying and thoughtful, the Sandman’s life fills 10 collections that belong on any fantasy fan’s bookshelf.

And now, seven years after Gaiman’s last tale of Dream, we get a brand new collection of tales of the Endless. Yes, the Sandman is here, but we also get to see what his siblings, Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium, Destruction and Destiny have been up to over the ages.

Gaiman is teamed up with a role call of international talents, ranging from P. Craig Russell and Bill Sienkiewicz to Milo Manara and Miguelanxo Prado, each of whom contribute their own vision to the mythos. (The most disturbing: Barron Storey’s “15 Portraits of Despair.”)

He captures the innocence of a folktale and mixes it with a macabre sense of wonderment. As with old European fairytales, the root of his stories is shocking as they betray their exterior.

“The Sandman: Endless Nights” (Vertigo Comics, $24.99) is a 152- page hardcover of short stories revisiting characters from Gaiman’s Sandman comic in vignettes.

There is Sandman, the living embodiment of dreams, and his messed up family — all personifications, too. There’s Death, Desire, Dream, Despair and Destiny, among others. They are concepts, for the most part, living in a physical form.

In the 1990s, Gaiman built his reputation by writing some of the most thought-provoking comic tales in decades. His comics are an intelligent art form, serving as social commentary while keeping a playful sense of irony.

“Endless Nights” is Gaiman at his sharpest. Each entry stands on its own merit.

The opener, “Death in Venice,” parallels two stories and is my favorite of the series. One is set in modern times, and the other is centuries ago. Their merging proves to be wonderfully terrifying in that Gaiman sort of way.

“Dream, Heart of a Star” is about a party attended by “god”-like beings with the same weaknesses of the heart as mere mortals.

Making “Endless Nights” complete is the jaw-dropping art. While “Endless Nights” is one of those rare comic examples where pictures are not needed — the words speak for themselves — the art magnifies the reading experience.

Scotsman Frank Quitely stretches his amazing abilities for Destiny’s story. The simple white background frames the images perfectly. Bill Sienkiewicz’s Delirium tale comes closest to representing in images what Gaiman does with the written word.

“Endless Night” can be bloody, perplexing and humane, sometimes all in the same story, sometimes all in the same frame. It’s a superb example of the kind of artistic standards that only comics can produce.