3) The Sandman: Endless Nights, by Neil Gaiman. a recent coda to the Sandman series, with one short story for each of the seven Endless siblings. A couple of them – Despair and Destiny – really seemed pretty pointless, and I didn’t think much of the Dream story either. I enjoyed all the others though; a marvellously sultry tale of Desire, and the Destruction, Delirium and Death stories all left me wishing they had been longer.
Huckleberry Finn is a collection of very good short stories that are struggling to become a novel. Some of them use dark humor to describe the grim realities of life in small towns that have limited communication with the outside world. I see the Tom Sawyer character’s shallowness as recognition that he is part of that limited culture, while Huck having been down the river, has started to see a bigger picture how human beings treat each other.
To me, the Tom Sawyer book hangs together better as a unified story. It has some grimness, but it is mostly comical. The interactions are mostly between children, and their problems involve family, friends and the imagination.