SOURCE: A review of Brief Lives, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 241, No. 43, October 24, 1994, pp. 57-8.

[Below, the critic offers a mixed assessment of Brief Lives.]

[Neil] Gaiman's very popular Sandman series (this is the eighth book in the series) continues with [Brief Lives] another tale of the Endless, the family of mythic cosmic beings that govern the psychic and physical realms of Dream, Desire, Despair, Destiny, Delirium, Destruction and Death. Morpheus, Lord of Dreams and the central figure in the series, is asked by his sister, the unstable and touchingly demented Delirium, to help locate their brother Destruction. Destruction abandoned his duties 300 years ago (about the time of the Enlightenment), dropping out of sight after a prescient and despairing glimpse of the rise of human reason and its own destructive proclivities. The grimly ironic Morpheus and his whimsically erratic sister travel among the mortals of earth in search of...