The Sandman

The Kindly Ones

The Kindly Ones belongs with the second collection, The Doll's House, and the seventh, Brief Lives, in that it finishes off a story that mostly originated in these collections; but includes elements of Season of Mists and the story of Orpheus, told mostly in Fables and Reflections. The most structurally ambitious of the collections, The Kindly Ones is a single storyline written as a Greek tragedy, with Morpheus as its doomed hero and an aspect of the triad of witches, the Erinyes, as the Greek chorus. It pulls together various threads left dangling throughout the series, notably the grudges against Morpheus of several characters: Hippolyta Hall, the witches themselves, the Norse god Loki, and the witch Thessaly. The Kindly Ones also continues several other stories, including that of Cluracan of Faerie and his sister Nuala, that of the Corinthian, and that of Rose Walker and her former landlord Hal.