American Gods

This novel is for readers who enjoy the road more than the destination. It crosses an America in which old and modern mythologies collide, held together by the taciturn, enigmatic Shadow. Some readers find that after a strong start it wanders, the plot’s direction unclear for long stretches, and give up there. Those who stay, or return to it later in life, find that its ideas about belief, grief and reinvention deepen with them.

Worth knowing Shadow Moon gets out of prison three days early because his wife has died in a car crash, and on the plane home a man who calls himself Mr Wednesday offers him a job; Wednesday is Odin, brought to America by the people who believed in him, and he is recruiting the old gods, who scrape a living as undertakers, cab drivers and prostitutes, for a war against the new ones, Media, the Technical Boy, the Intangibles. The book is a road trip through roadside America, the House on the Rock, Rock City, a town in Wisconsin where nothing bad ever happens. Neil Gaiman published it in 2001 and it took the Hugo, the Nebula and the Bram Stoker in 2002, a rare sweep; the Author’s Preferred Text of 2011 is twelve thousand words longer. A television series ran from 2017.

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