The House of Mystery, sentient and tired after enduring eons of living with Cain, makes an attempt of its caretaker's life before ultimately deciding to burn itself down. Cain, now without a home and forced to rely on his fellow residents of the Dreaming, falls into a deep depression and ends the arc by leaving behind Abel and Gregory to go off and sort things on his own.
This arc puts a focus on domiciles of the Dreaming, including the House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Eve's Cave of Nightmares, Lucien's Library, and an unnamed equivalent to the House of Mystery in R'lyeh. These domiciles often reflect the current state of their owners, and the state of their owners reflects upon the domiciles.
"Many Mansions" was The Dreaming's first major storyline of an extended length, and its events were foreshadowed in The Dreaming Special - Trial and Error, wherein the House of Mystery expresses contempt for Cain for the first time.
The storyline lacks a chapter labelled "Part Six", instead skipping from "Part Five" to "Part Seven". This is because the storyline was broken up by an unrelated one-shot story in issue #32, written by a different author. Likely there was a miscommunication between the two different writers, and the writer of the "Many Mansions" issues assumed that #32 was just another chapter in the ongoing story and mislabeled the next chapters. Thus, "Part Seven" and "Part Eight" are really "Part Six" and "Part Seven", respectably.
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