In 1916 the English magician Roderick Burgess attempts a ritual to capture Death and bargain his way out of mortality. He snares her younger brother instead - Dream of the Endless, the lord of sleep and stories - and for seventy years Burgess, and then his son Alex, keep him silent in a glass circle beneath the house while his three totems of power are scattered into the waking world.
This opening volume collects the first eight issues of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. Freed at last, Dream returns home to find his realm fallen into ruin, and goes looking for his helm, his pouch of sand and his ruby. The search takes him to the house of Cain and Abel, into a bargain with the exorcist John Constantine, down to Hell for a battle of wits with Lucifer, and finally to Arkham Asylum, where the madman John Dee has taken the ruby and turns it on a roomful of strangers in a diner.
Illustrated by Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III, it is the series at its darkest and most horror-inflected, still half-tethered to the DC universe it started in. It closes with "The Sound of Her Wings", a self-contained issue in which Dream's elder sister Death arrives to walk her rounds with him - the chapter that turned a revenge story into the beginning of something much larger.