But new mythologies wait for us, here in the final moments of the twentieth century. They abound and proliferate: urban legends of men with hooks in lovers’ lanes, hitchhikers with hairy hands and meat cleavers, beehive hairdos crawling with vermin, serial killers and barroom conversations; in the background our TV screens pour disjointed images into our living rooms, feeding us old movies, newsflashes, talk shows, adverts; we mythologize the way we dress and the things we say; iconic figures—rock stars and politicians, celebrities of every shape and size; the new mythologies of magic and science and numbers and fame.

They have their function, all the ways we try to make sense of the world we inhabit, a world in which there are few, if any, easy answers. Every day we attempt to understand it. And every night we close our eyes, and go to sleep, and, for a few hours, quietly and safely, we go stark staring mad.

The ten volumes of Sandman were my way of talking about that. They were my way of looking at the mythologies of the last decade of the twentieth century; a way of talking about sex and death, fear and belief and joy—all the things that make us dream.

We spend a third of our lives asleep, after all.

IV

HORROR AND FANTASY (whether in comics form or otherwise) are often seen simply as escapist literature. Sometimes they can be—a simple, paradoxically unimaginative literature offering quick catharsis, a plastic dream, an easy out. But they don’t have to be. When we are lucky the fantastique offers a roadmap—a guide to the territory of the imagination, for it is the function of imaginative literature to show us the world we know, but from a different direction.

Too often myths are uninspected. We bring them out without looking at what they represent, nor what they mean. Urban legends and the Weekly World News present us with myths in the simplest sense: a world in which events occur according to story logic—not as they do happen, but as they should happen.

But retelling myths is important. The act of inspecting them is important. It is not a matter of holding a myth up as a dead thing, desiccated and empty (“Now, class, what have we learned from the Death of Baldur?”), nor is it a matter of creating New Age self-help tomes (“The Gods Inside You! Releasing Your Inner Myth”). Instead we have to understand that even lost and forgotten myths are compost, in which stories grow.

What is important is to tell the stories anew, and to retell the old stories. They are our stories, and they should be told.

I do not even begrudge the myths and the fairy stories their bowdlerization: the purist in me may be offended by the Disney retellings of old tales, but I am, where stories are concerned, cruelly Darwinist. The forms of the tales that work survive, the others die and are forgotten. It may have suited Disney’s dramatic purposes to have Sleeping Beauty prick her finger, sleep and be rescued, all in a day, but when the tale is retold it will always be at least a hundred years until the spell is broken—even if we have long since lost from the Perrault story the prince’s cannibal mother; and Red Riding Hood ends these days with a rescue, not with the child being eaten, because that is the form of the story that has survived.