My fist meeting with the Sandman camed with this album, and at the right time as well. High school was - is - a time of self defining. A time where the grown-up you starts to emerge. A time of searching outside and inside one self.

Religion was a big issue with me. Questions about the dark side. Demonology, magic, magick, satanism, christianity - the whole shebang. So just happening to stumble upon this story of how Lucifer decides to quit his dayjob and lock the doors to hell. And the subsequent intriguing from various deities. How could Gaiman fail?

How could anyone fail, really?

Rereading it today, some two decades later, I notice the magic surrounding this having declined some. Maybe it's my fault, though? Work, kids, house... These things tend to intrude upon one's ability to lose oneself completely. Reality imposes - physically - when the 4-year old hits his sister over the head with his (luckily!) plastic sword just as the snake starts dripping venom in Loki's eyes again. Screams of pain from the page and the living room mingle and pretty soon Loki is no more than a drawing in a closed book, while the father/reader discusses swordplay and brotherhood with the tiny knight AND comforts the crying sister.

There are moments of peaceful reading too, of course. But that doesn't quite help anyway. The story isn't as full as I had hoped it to be. As I remebered it to be.

Still damned goog, though.

But even the endless age, it seems...