Volume three of Sandman, “Dream Country,” was an exploration of the different possibilities of dream. One such story juxtaposes the familiar elements of a super-hero tale with the horror of body alteration and mental illness. The unlikely protagonist of the story was Element Girl, an almost forgotten DC heroine. In the tale, Element Girl longs for death as she grows weary with her freakish metahuman anatomy. Tired of her existence as a super freak, Element Girl ponders suicide even though her powers make her functionally immortal. The tale explores the dark heart of a once innocent genre as Gaiman forces the horrors of self-doubt and self-loathing into the heart of a once innocent symbol of heroism. The story explores the theme of the horrors of everyday life to a being who has been gifted, or cursed, with the extraordinary. It is a poignant and gut wrenching tale that strangely ends on a happy note when Dream’s sister, Death, finally visits Element Girl granting her release. The constant irony of The Sandman is that Dream potentially brings horrors but Death always brings mercy and release.

The Sandman, being the living embodiment of dream, hands out rich fantasies and nightmares depending on his situation. Dream saves Rose in Doll’s House but willingly inflicts horrors on his own true love, Nada. In volume four, “Season of Mists,” Dream returns to Hell to release the woman he imprisoned there so long ago. Nada’s tragic tale is one of feminist horror as she takes on the role of victim and is tormented for her feminine nature. She is the roll of love, not temptress or vixen, but of a pure love that Dream could not reciprocate. She is the victim wandering in the darkness waiting for the monster to strike, but In Nada’s case, the monster was Gaiman’s protagonist blurring the lines between hero and monster in Gaiman’s world.

These lines are further blurred as Dream is given the key to Hell by Lucifer, who wishes to abandon his duties as Hell’s keeper. What follows is Dream’s quest to find the new ruler of Hell, as horror archetypes vie for the key. Gaiman humanizes them, filling the demons with unfulfilled desire and ambition. They become more than just boogiemen, but dreamers themselves. In fact, the story ends with the greatest monster in world history, Lucifer, the devil himself, sitting on a beach admiring a sunset. By having the antithesis of God studying God’s divine work, the traditional horror role is cast away, informing the reader that the greatest monsters are not always the ones cast in the role, as the suffering of Nada at the usually magnanimous Dream reminds us.

The horrors in Sandman are sometimes friendly, like the Dead Boy Detectives and Death herself, but they never stop being unsettling. Readers want to be Superman or Batman, that is the nature of heroic storytelling, but what reader is not chilled to the core by the Dead Boy Detectives? The reader is drawn to them, feels for them, and roots for them, but no reader would ever want to be them. That is their role in the hierarchy of horror: they may be likable, but they will always remain removed from the reader’s reliability. The same idea of the likable but chilling archetype is embodied in the witch, Thessaly. Like the Dead Boys, Thessaly is every inch a witch, and while she is likable and compelling, she is an incredibly unsettling character, because her character roots are firmly planted in the realm of horror.

Thessaly is introduced in volume five, “A Game of You,” a story that plays with gender identity and societal acceptance of those who dwell outside the accepted moralistic reality of the waking world. The main characters of the story are Barbie and Wanda. Wanda is a cross dresser defined by her birth role of male, but readers of Sandman get to see her in the metaphysical context of the Dreaming and she is every bit a women. The horror she is forced to endure is that her identity does not match up in the physical world and the dream world. In the world of Sandman, even monsters have their place, but Wanda is forced to exist removed from her given role. Her death and subsequent funeral are heart breaking and stays with a reader. Her tombstone, with her male name carved into it for eternity because her own family refuses to accept her identity, is as chilling and as brutal as any vampire, zombie, or serial killer. It is the horror of omission, and it is subtle but as enduringly brutal as any other event in Sandman.