#matthew cable

NG sets the scene in the script: "We're looking at Hell, or at least a portion of it. Now, for this initial shot I want to move as far away from the current interpretation of Hell as possible — no twisted geometries, no flames everywhere, no giant maggots and heads on pikes, all that stuff. Let's look instead at what hell means to us: for me, it's concentration camps — endless, bleak camps of fat, jerry-rigged buildings, 'shower rooms' which are gas chambers, huge ovens for burning the bodies: Hell is living there, Hell for me is knowing that one day you'll go for your shower, Hell is really knowing what's going on in Auschwitz, or Dachau, or Belsen, but pretending to yourself that you don't, because that makes it easier to get through the following day. That's part of Hell.

Hell is factories, and industrial waste, air you can't breathe and water you can't drink. Hell is walking past the Port of New York Authority building on a hot day and watching two men with dead eyes stealing a handful of pennies from a third, who sits on the sidewalk and silently cries as the first two divide their loot. That's the kind of Hell we're looking at here. It's a long shot, but somewhere below us there should be a number of terribly thin, naked people, standing up to their knees in mud. There's no sun in the sky, and the horizon is muggy and smoggy, composed of factory chimneys, belching smog and ash into the air."

Avernus, a crater west of Naples, Italy, was thought to be an entrance to the underworld; later, the name became synonymous with the underworld.

Gehenna was an actual place, the valley of Hinnom near Jerusalem, where the city's refuse was dumped and incin-erated. According to ancient legends, sacrifices of children to Moloch took place in the valley; other legends associating Gehenna with a burning afterworld of hellfire claimed that an actual gate to that world stood in the valley.

Hades was the god and ruler of the Greek underworld, the son of Cronus and Rhea. When Cronus was over-thrown, the dominion of the world was divided among Hades (Pluton) and his other sons, Zeus and Poseidon, by lot; Hades took control of the darkness of night and the underworld. As tradition developed, the name Pluto became attached to the god and the name Hades to his domain. Hades was surrounded by five rivers, Styx, Acheron, Pyriphlegethon, Cocytus, and Lethe. In Greek mythology Tartarus was a region beneath Hades, into which originally only those who were a threat to the gods were cast. Other mythologies made it synonymous.

Abaddon, literally the "place of destruction" in Hebrew, was associated with Sheol and later identified as a region of Gehenna.

Sheol was originally a Hebrew term for the grave, the place into which all of the dead traveled to await resurrection. The New Testament, however, generally differentiated between Sheol and Gehenna, with the latter the place of abode of sinners.

Demons

"Demon" is a Greek word of confused etymology.

The Greek philosophers saw demons as intermediate between gods and men. Initially, religions of the world distinguished nature-spirits such as elves and nymphs, concerned with living men and their affairs, from the demons, often considered to be ghosts of dead men. According to the Encyclopadia Britannica (9th Ed.), the earliest notion of demons included "the whole class of such spirits, who may be friendly or hostile, good or evil, persecuting and tormenting man or acting as protecting and informing patron-spirits..." While Christian theology introduced a narrower definition, merging "good" demons with angels and leaving the term "demon" applicable only to evil spirits or devils, "the study of demonology also brings into view the tendency of hostile religions to degrade into evil demons the deities of rival faiths."

What's going on with all these authors and their books?

In an interview, NG confesses that he probably unconsciously took the idea of a library of ideal books from James Branch Cabell's Beyond Life. (SC, p. 98).

Psmith and Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. Rupert (or Ronald Eustace) Psmith was a roguish former Etonian whose adventures were recorded in three novels by British humorist P.G. Wodehouse between 1908 and 1910, with a final adventure published in 1923. Reginald jeeves, created in 1915 by Wodehouse, was a gentleman's gentleman, who frequently saved his employer Bertie Wooster from humorously complex situations. Although Psmith and jeeves never met, Wodehousians dream of the day when their unknown adventures together might be discovered.

Love Can Be Murder by Raymond Chandler. The theme of love drawing people into violent situations was common to virtually all of Chandler's classic Philip Marlowe mysteries, The theme is especially prominent in Farewell, My Lovely (1940), in which Moose Malloy attempts to track down "his" Velma, the woman he left behind on entering prison eight years earlier. At his death in 1959, Chandler left four chapters of an unfinished novel entitled The Poodle Springs Story, which mystery writer Robert B. Parker completed in 1989 under the title Poodle Springs.

The Dark God's Darlings by Lord Dunsany. Dunsany (1878-1957), one of the neglected fantasists of the 20th century, was a prolific writer whose dark tales influenced several generations of writers, including H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur C. Glarke, Gene Wolfe, and Neil Gaiman. In the late 1990s, the curator of Dunsany's castle discovered a number of previously unpublished works; this one has not yet been published.

The Hand of Glory by Erasmus Fry. Fry appears in Issue #17, and little is known of his work. A "hand of glory" is a magical artifact, the dried and preserved hand of a hanged man (usually the left), said to bring great luck to the owner or provide a variety of other magical powers. Fry apparently had an affinity for such objects.

The Return of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens. The Mystery of Edwin Drood is one of Charles Dickens's most famous novels, partly because it is tantalizingly incomplete due to Dickens's untimely death. Numerous other writers have proposed their own solutions or conclusions to the tale; Dickens's own version would be a great treasure.

The Conscience of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. A strange title — does this refer to Dr. Watson, who from time to time speaks to Holmes as if he is the latter's inner voice? NG remarks in an interview that this is a book he thought should have been written but wasn't, a conscience being "the one thing that Holmes didn't have." (SC, p. 98)

Poictesme Babylon by James Branch Cabell. Fantasist Cabell (1879-1958) is best-known for Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919). The eponymous hero journeys through fantastic realms, where he beds numerous women. He even visits Hell, where he seduces the Devil's wife. Jurgen was part of a saga of Cabell's creation, comprising 25 books, which he referred to as the "biography of Manuel," a swincherd who eventually ruled the fictional province of Poictesme, in southern France. Presumably this lost book would have continued the adventures of jurgen and characters from Cabell's other works.

The Man Who Was October by G.K. Chesterton. The title is a play on Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), a seminal fantastic work presaging Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World and mixing political thought with Christian allegory. We may suppose that Chesterton intended a sequel to the original book. "Thursday" was a code name for the principal character; in Chesterton's mind, he may have envisioned another secret organization with equally fanciful names. A quote from the book appears at 28.24.4.

The Lost Road by J.R.R. Tolkien. This title was added by letterer Todd Klein. Tolkien's epic tales of elves, men, dwarves, and orcs, written in the 1930s and 1940s, gained an immense audience in the 1960s with mass-market editions and seem to grow in popularity annually. After his death in 1973, his son Christopher Tolkien published a number of unfinished works of his father. A fragment of "The Lost Road," apparently written in 1937 or 1938, was published in 1987 as part of The Lost Road and Other Writings. It arose out of a conversation between fellow Inklings J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis about the state of contemporary fiction. Tolkien later wrote in a letter: "We agreed that he should try 'space-travel, and I should try 'time-travel? His result is well known (the Perelandra trilogyl. My effort, after a few promising chapters, ran dry." The tale describes a "road" that connects different eras of history, some of Tolkien's invention, some based on historical evidence.

Alice's Journey Behind the Moon by Lewis Carroll. To the delight of millions of readers, Carroll (1832-1898) famously wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Behind the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). While he wrote numerous other books, poems, and essays, none achieved the success of these two. However, art imitates art: In 2004, R.J. Carter published a wholly original work entitled Alice's Journey Beyond the Moon in which Carter related the adventures of Carroll's Alice in space. NG remarked in his blog that this was the first book to escape the Library of Dream into the real world.

The following were listed in the script but didn't appear in the published version:

Cthulhu Springtime by H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was the greatest writer of horror in the 20th century, as well as the first serious scholar of the genre, and Cthulhu is the chief of his Old Ones, godlike beings who have vanished from Earth. The book must have been intended to tell of their return. The title is reminiscent of the brilliantly bad musical Springtime for Hitler, produced by Mel Brooks's The Producers (1968).

Lord Greystoke of Barsoom by Edgar Rice Burroughs.Tarzan meets john Carter et al. One can only imagine the adventure! Carter was featured in only three of Burroughs's novels, while Lord Greystoke appeared in twenty-three. NG also reveals in an interview that the library's collection encompasses other media, such as film, art, and music, including among its movies "all the stories Orson Welles made in his head but could never get the financing to film." (SC, p. 99)

Lucifer

Samael is a name for Lucifer, the prince of devils, in early Jewish commentary. Literally, it means "venom of God," and many scholars see this etymology as cementing his identification with the angel of death. However, the name may have derived from the Syrian god Shemal.

More about Matthew…

[I wrote about Matthew’s story and his first meeting with Dream in a bit more detail here]

In his mortal life as Matthew Cable, Matthew crashes his car while going after his wife Abby to straighten out matters with her, killing himself. However, a demon in the form of a fly agrees to revive him. This resurrection permits Anton Arcane, a ruthless soul pursuing a vendetta against the Swamp Thing, to escape from Hell and possess Cable's body, attaining his powers (see Vol. 1, 15.23.5). Although Matthew eventually triumphs over Arcane, there is significant collateral damage, including the molestation of Matthew's wife Abby. See Saga of the Swamp Thing, Vol. 2, #26-31 (jul.-Dec. 1984).

Lyta's weird pregnancy led to continuity errors…

Hippolyta's father is Steve Trevor [I wrote about Lyta’s messy pre- and post-crisis DC history briefly here]. See Vol. 1, 11.5.5. NG comments in the script for Issue #40 about the age of the child: "Actually that's the one continuity slip in the whole of Sandman — Daniel's age. Theoretically he should have been born about 3 months after the end of 'The Doll's House, in about February or March of 1990... Even if Lyta's metabolism took a while to get back into sync again, she still should have had the baby in spring. Trouble was he had to be newborn in Sandman #22, so I could do the stuff about his naming.

"I suppose if anyone asks, it's sort of fudgeable: Time in dreams is slightly iffy, and more to the point, time in Hell is extremely iffy — the only real honest-to-goodness date given in "Season of Mists" was that the dead came back in December '90. But it irritates me. Everything else works just fine. I suppose if anyone ever asks me I'll just have to admit that I don't understand it either..."

Why Daniel?

In an interview, NG states that the boy's name "connects to the Daniel in the Bible who has visions and interprets dreams." (SC, p. 101) Of course, ultimately he will have no name. See Vol. 4, 72.19.6, when he denies that he is Daniel.

The Toast

There are no extant tasting notes for the 1828 Chateau Lafitte. Michael Broadbent, in his New Great Vintage Wine Book (1991) notes a five-star rating for the 1825 vintage based on his tasting in 1975. The négociant Nicolas recorded a 5 franc price for the original bottling.

Hob's toast appears to be original. The most famous reference to the "season of mists" is in John Keats's To Autumn (1820):

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.