Inside of Gaiman's Sandman series are loads of fascinating characters, one of my favorites is his sister Death. She's got the sunniest disposition of them all. She loves Disney movies, she's a sweetheart really. And with witty little remarks like "It takes just as much effort to be nice as it does to be creepy" she's my kind of girl. So you can imagine how excited I was to learn that there was a spin-off in which she is focused upon.
This book plays with the oft-used idea that once every century Death takes a day to live as a mortal, to remind her what the people she takes life from go through. Today she's spending the day with Sexton, a teenager who has decided that life is just too 'meh' to bother living.
I have to be honest and say that I was kind of let down by this. I still love Death here, and if you're a fan of her it's worth reading for her alone - she's done justice here - but the story that she's in, I could really care less about. It could be that this book is now over a decade old and the teen-angst-woe-is-me thing has been really over-played, but I just found this story to be underwhelming. It was surprising to learn that Gaiman had planned to make a film version of this as well. One particularly interesting thing about this book is that, at the back of it, there is a comic-PSA where Death speaks directly to the reader about AIDs and HIV and it instantly took me back to being a teenager in the early nineties when it seemed like every celebrity was doing some kind of PDA to promote awareness of the desease. Pretty fascinating, definitly a product of it's time.
There is another Death spin-off, but I can't see myself rushing out to buy it. I'll pick it up eventually for my love of the character and Sandman in general - but I just, like Sexton, felt a bit 'meh' about the whole thing.
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