American Gods - Neil Gaiman
2001
American Gods tells the story of a man named Shadow and his journeys with the mysterious Mr. Wednesday. Mere days before he is set to be released from prison, his wife and best friend are killed in a car accident. On the flight back to the funeral, Shadow meets Mr. Wednesday, who seems to know everything about him before they meet. Mr. Wednesday hires Shadow as a bodyguard and errand boy, and they set off on a deeply bizarre trek through America, meeting with the forgotten and beaten down gods who came to America with the people of the old worlds who believed in them. Mr. Wednesday and Shadow’s goal is to enlist the assistance of all of the old-world gods in the war that is about to happen. The book tells the story of the lead up to the battle between the old and forgotten old-world gods and the new world gods, personified mostly as modern inventions (Internet, Telephone, Train, etc.). As gods are slowly forgotten, they lose their strength and become destitute, and they believe this turf war with the new god will save them from further decay.
My favourite section of this book was the middle part, where Shadow is stuck in a remote community in Wisconsin for the winter. I think Gaiman was able to capture both the positive and negative aspects of small town living effectively, and I thought the characters that Shadow meets in this town were not mere caricatures, but real people. Sometimes the dialog seemed a little stilted, but there wasn’t a ton of dialog, the book was mostly narrative, always from inside Shadow’s head. Also, I totally missed that Low Key == Loki until the very end.
American Gods was wonderful. It was dark and moody without being creepy, and there was a zombie and a leprechaun. What else does a good book need? I was frequently reminded while reading this book of The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul by Douglas Adams, which works with a lot of the same notions. However, this book is certainly not a comedy. With everything I read by Neil Gaiman, I become more and more interested in reading the rest of his work. Also, he was great on Colbert on Monday night, and his blog and Twitter feed are both pretty great.
