Death: The High Cost of Living »

Novelist Neil Gaiman has sent a British businessman tumbling into a fantastic underworld and had a devil and angel comically conspiring to thwart the Apocalypse. He found his biggest success, though, in Death, Dreams and Destruction -- and the four other similarly named siblings who controlled the reins of the human race's emotional impulses in his graphic-novel series The Sandman, a wholesale rejuvenation of graphic fiction that had everyone from Tori Amos to Norman Mailer spinning with, yes, Delirium.

From the pages of Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN comes the young, pale, perky, and genuinely likable Death. One day in every century, Death walks the Earth to better understand those to whom she will be the final visitor. Today is that day. As a young mortal girl named Didi, Death befriends a teenager and helps a 250-year old homeless woman find her missing heart. What follows is a sincere musing on love, life and (of course) death.

Publishers Weekly

The High Cost of Living is a continuation of Harvey Award-winning fantasy writer Gaiman's series detailing the cosmic duties of a loose family of seven immortals. Not quite Gods, they embody realms of psychic experience: Dream, Desire, Despair, Destiny, Delirium, Destruction and Gaiman's very popular character, Death. Reaper, yes; but Death's not very grim as she goes about her business visiting the just-about-to-die and ushering them into their new existence. In this story she meets Sexton, a teenager contemplating suicide, and they end up searching New York City to find a witch's heart (the old hag hid it centuries ago, it's a witch tradition), so the old girl can hide it again. Up pops the Eremite, an evil wizard type, out to steal Death's mysterious necklace, who makes the usual threats against life and limb. Gaiman has created a character sweetly at odds with her modbid duties; dressed like a Satanic rocker, she's as pretty as a cheerleader and even more upbeat. While Gaiman brings a gritty urban contemporaneity to the fantasy genre, the story also suffers from a TV script-like sensibility--danger-defying quips, the good-hearted overweight black neighbor, melodramatic villain. Nevertheless the combination of wry mystic immortal and MTV slacker produces an engaging chemistry. Top-notch production, and although the illustration is a bit stiff, it's stylishly rendered and very nicely colored. The introduction is by pop singer Tori Amos. (Apr.)