The eighth collection of Sandman comics, "Worlds' End", is all about cities, or rather it's about the physical and metaphorical places we occupy in our lives. Like "Dream Country" and "Fables and Reflections", "Worlds' End" isn't a continuation of the main plot of Sandman, but a collection of mostly stand-alone stories in which some of the Endless have cameos. There are teasing references to other, larger developments to come, but mostly the collection lingers on a group of lost travelers from various corners of the universe. The frame story places the lot of them together at an inn located, as their hostess claims, at the end of all worlds. Whether that means the literal conclusion, the edge of each reality or something more complicated, we never quite find out. To stave off boredom while the inexplicable storm outside rages, the travelers each tell stories of varying truth and import.

"Worlds' End" is a mish-mash of genres. It opens with a quite literally Modernist fable, followed by a high fantasy adventure, a sea shanty, a political satire and finally a morbid rumination on ritual. Within each of these stories are yet more stories, creating a layered effect that is sometimes baffling. In one case, "Hob's Leviathan", a character within the story begins to tell a story featuring a character who, himself, tells a story. From the outside, this seems ridiculous and scatterbrained, but in the context of Sandman it makes a strange kind of sense. The series is all about the nature of storytelling and its many facets. The stacking doll effect of the tales in "Worlds' End" demonstrates how human storytelling evolves. People tell a story, then later generations build upon it to make their own stories. After a while, a few millennia or so, whole societies can be built on yarns and fables.

Consider the United States, a nation made of stories if ever there was one. Much of our government and indeed many of our earliest city plans and architectural designs were based on the ideals of classical republics such as Athens and Rome, only the concepts the founders had of these ancient systems were often based on those preserved and often altered by the likes of the Venetian Empire. The famous Ride of Paul Revere as we tell it today is the invention of the writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, not the truth of what happened during the initial British invasion in the American Revolution. Modern-day America is a concept made of fictions and dramatizations, the seeds of which were planted sometimes thousands of years ago. It's the great story of our land, of the city or cities we occupy.

The other effect the layered stories of "Worlds' End" have is a renewed sense of disorientation. Because so much of Sandman gives readers a behind-the-scenes perspective on the ways of its universe, it's easy to fall into a false sense of understanding. By depositing us in a room full of creatures from various realities, all with their own limited, incomplete but partially true worldview, we get to reorient ourselves back into our rightful place as confused humans who don't know more than an infinitesimal fraction of what life is really about.