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Neil Gaiman, “American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition”

By Talia Lavin

I first fell in love with “American Gods” when I was fifteen. Neil Gaiman’s sprawling novel, from 2001, had influences that at the time I hadn’t really encountered—echoes of Tim O’Brien, Don DeLillo, and Stephen King, not to mention the mythologies it explicitly draws from—and that were completely exhilarating for a suburban teen-ager. I wanted to hunker down in the back seat with Shadow, the book’s taciturn protagonist, and Wednesday, the con-man god, and all the rest of the motley crew, and immerse myself in America’s long, rambling highways, as Gaiman, pictured at right, so patently had. Last year, when Starz aired a TV series based on the book, I liked some things—Ian McShane was the embodiment of the gruff, sly Wednesday—but the show’s fixation on slow, violin-scored rains of blood, and its general sacrifice of characterization for slick visuals, grew dull long before the season finale.

Feeling nostalgic, I downloaded the tenth-anniversary edition of the audiobook to my iPhone, ready to use the familiar tale to soothe me to sleep. Instead, it was more compelling than it had any right to be. From Gaiman’s mannered British interludes to the expert narration of Dennis Boutsikaris, Daniel Oreskes, Ron McLarty, and Sarah Jones, the audiobook rolls along with the delicious, strange rhythm of the road narrative it’s telling. Oreskes’s rumbling baritone deftly brings Shadow to life; McLarty is the perfect combination of wicked and winsome; and Boutsikaris’s earnest narration—he’s narrated more than a hundred audiobooks—gathers the whole unwieldy tapestry together. The effect of the audiobook, in comparison to the show, was a bit like finding that a well-rendered sketch can be far more evocative than a clumsily colored painting. I was surprised to find how well the book had aged, even if, from time to time, Gaiman’s ambitions outstrip his skill; spoken aloud, his stabs at slangy American dialogue wilt. Still, the audio edition of this book would be a fantastic soundtrack to a long drive over the open spaces of the United States, should you seek to find, in their grittiest corners, a hidden pantheon.

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By Alex Ross

By Inkoo Kang

By Vinson Cunningham

By Cressida Leyshon

American Gods

By neil gaiman.

An imaginative story told in Neil Gaiman's immersive and dark style, 'American Gods' is also a commentary on America's complex relationship with foreign gods.

About the Book

Article written by Ebuka Igbokwe

Bachelor's degree from Nnamdi Azikiwe University.

‘ American Gods ’ tells the story of Shadow, an ex-convict who is released on parole to find the world he expected to meet gone: his wife and his former boss whom he expects to give him are dead. He is recruited as a bodyguard by a mysterious figure who turns out to be a god preparing to battle other gods, and Shadow is ushered into a mind-bending fantasy where nothing is as it seems.

Neil Gaiman is an author of fantasy and speculative fiction and was born in England in 1960. He has written various novels including ‘ Neverwhere ,’ ‘ Anansi Boys ,’ and ‘ Ocean at the End of The Lane ’. He has also published fiction for children such as ‘ Coraline ,’ ‘ The Graveyard Book ’ and ‘ Stardust ,’ and the critically acclaimed comic book, ‘T he Sandman ’. Gaiman is a recipient of various awards for his writing, receiving the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards for ‘ American Gods ’ alone.

‘ American Gods ’ may start as a story about a war between gods, but it reads like more than that: American travelogue and road-trip story, horror, fantasy, detective fiction. It is an ambitious and sprawling narrative through which Neil Gaiman attempted to make sense of America and tell the things he discovered about America to Americans.

The central plot of the novel is intriguing and Gaiman’s execution of the story idea has great merit. Gaiman adapts different myths and legends in this modern-day drama to satisfying effect and explores cultural identities and the nature of belief and gods in the background of a fantasy-horror-mystery story. From the beginning, the narrative keeps up a vital energy, and the reader is immersed in a world of fantasy where abnormal events feel as if they fit. There is no border between genres and Neil Gaiman applies himself with free rein to tell a story without limitations.

The main problem a reader may find is that the story is fragmentary, and there seems to be little to link fragments of the story as one tale . While the Mike Ainsel storyline happens in the world and time of the war between the Old Gods and New Gods, the events seem to belong to two different stories.

Themes and Symbolism

The major theme explored in the story is the idea of gods manifested through the thoughts of man and was developed very convincingly. The Old Gods’ main problem stemmed from replenishing their lost glory and power when the people who used to worship them had forgotten them, and the New Gods’ ascendancy was a result of the ideas they represented gaining attention in the present. Other themes such as America as a melting pot, and the dissonance between what is apparent and what is real, are a metacommentary on the society. Gaiman does a fantastic job of showing how humans are manipulated into believing something as long as it seems honest, and how belief is man’s power and also his vulnerability. Also using Wednesday as an example, he shows how man’s belief is the god’s power but the dependence on this source of power is their weakness. A weak point in the novel is how it restates almost ad nauseam that America is a bad place for gods, but Jesus, Allah, and Yahweh, which are still worshipped in modern-day America are conspicuously absent. However, one can understand that the author refrained from this treatment out of respect for people’s religions.

Characterization

The cast of ‘American Gods’ is diverse and colorful, drawn from legends, myths, and contemporary sources. Each of these has their unique quirk and personality, from loud Mad Sweeney to stoic Shadow to vengeful Audrey to dour Czernobog, and this gives the narrative a lively feel as the interplay of these characters is a source of healthy tension and increases the realistic feel of it. But the novel does not escape a problem common to stories with a lot of characters : very few of them have any impact on the story and a lot do not carry their weight and seem only to provide a background. Also, you have a few who are tropes such as Samantha representing the manic pixie girl and Hinzelmann the kindly old man who is evil behind his lovely exterior.

The dialogue in ‘American Gods’ is rich with humor and wisdom and contains deep insights into the relationships between individuals as themselves and as integrated into a community of shared beliefs and identity. The talk is lively and moves the story along, too. However, some parts drag and sometimes a a character drones on that one wonders how the listener had not left them mid-speech and gone off. In a particular case, Samantha goes on for three paragraphs about belief when Shadow tells her that his story is pretty incredible.

Most of the story is set in modern-day America, while other brief digressions serve to give appropriate context to the narrative. This choice made the story very relatable. (The story’s fantastical elements interact with a solid and recognizable world) The sites where the action unfolds gain—when they match up to real-life places—a certain totemic weight. But a fight between gods might need a Mt. Olympus, and when cars, guns, and other quotidian items are used for the battle between gods, an epic quality is absent in the story.

• Writing Style

Neil Gaiman’s style is literary and picturesque. He uses metaphor in a very eloquent and flowing way and strives to capture a mood that the reader can almost touch. It almost feels like one is seeing a movie when following his descriptions. People who prefer a direct narrative style may be turned off by his style.

American Gods: Gods Wars in Contemporary America

Book Title: American Gods

Book Description: 'American Gods' by Neil Gaiman is a riveting odyssey through a modern America where ancient gods clash with new deities born from technology and media. Gaiman's masterful storytelling weaves together of myth and reality, exploring the impact of faith and the fragility of gods in the American society. This layered narrative invites readers on a thrilling ride that blends fantasy, cultural commentary, and existential reflection.

Book Author: Neil Gaiman

Book Edition: 10th Anniversary Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: William Morrow

Date published: June 21, 2021

ISBN: 978-0062059888

Number Of Pages: 560

• Lasting Effect on Reader

American Gods Review

‘ American Gods ‘ brings us to Neil Gaiman’s imagination of America, with a meta-analysis of its cultural quirks and particular personality traits, situated in the drama of a battle among personified deities.

• immersive storytelling
• engaging theme
• evocative use of language
• too many characters
• too many genres
• anticlimatic ending

About Ebuka Igbokwe

Ebuka Igbokwe is the founder and former leader of a book club, the Liber Book Club, in 2016 and managed it for four years. Ebuka has also authored several children's books. He shares philosophical insights on his newsletter, Carefree Sketches and has published several short stories on a few literary blogs online.

Cite This Page

Igbokwe, Ebuka " American Gods Review ⭐️ " Book Analysis , https://bookanalysis.com/neil-gaiman/american-gods/review/ . Accessed 9 April 2024.

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A book for the beach: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Beaches, like books, offer a dislocation from reality, and when taken together the effect is multiplied many times. I love getting lost in a narrative then being jarred out of it by a noisy fellow holidaymaker and looking up, blinking, to remember I'm lying awkwardly on a towel on some sun-kissed shore, miles from home.

Like the terra firma of a beach bordering the seemingly endless sea spooling out and away from the land, Neil Gaiman's American Gods offers that same sense of being anchored to reality but at the same time being merely a bulwark against something massive and frightening and ultimately unknowable.

It seems a little odd now, given his ubiquity, but when American Gods was published in 2001 Gaiman wasn't a household name, unless your household happened to be filled with long-boxes of the comic books on which he had built his career. It wasn't his first, but American Gods feels like his first proper novel; previous outings had been Neverwhere , which was essentially a novelisation of his own screenplay for a BBC TV production whose budget never quite matched his imagination, and Stardust, a slight (though satisfying) fairytale originally conceived as an illustrated book with the artist Charles Vess.

My copy of American Gods (the original mass-market paperback; some years later a "director's cut" was released with a further 12,000 words) has pages stained with sun-cream and crinkled by damp and heat. When it was released the publishers offered to refund the price of the book to anyone who didn't find it "as good as Stephen King". It seems an odd, skittish thing to do from a marketing team who perhaps wasn't quite sure in which box this imagination needed to be forced.

The only thing American Gods shares with a King blockbuster is perhaps its heft, clocking in at a meaty 600-plus pages and satisfyingly heavy, enough to weigh down the corner of a beach mat should an unexpected chill wind rise suddenly. That and perhaps the fact that American Gods attempts to pierce the dark heart of America. But Gaiman isn't trying to expose the American Nightmare, like King, he's rather unspooling the many disparate threads that created America to find the wonder in the weave.

American Gods begins with Shadow, a big man in his 30s who keeps himself to himself as he serves out the final days of a prison sentence for armed robbery. Two days before his release date he is let out early; his wife Laura has died in a road accident. Aimless and bereft, Shadow begins the lonely journey to an empty home when he is offered a job as bodyguard to the mysterious Mr Wednesday.

Wednesday, it transpires, is not the rogueish old man that he seems, or at least, not just that. He's a god, albeit one without much in the way of worshippers. But he's a god we know, though it takes Shadow an agonisingly long time to cotton on to who he is (the clue, as with everything in this book, is in the name, Wednesday, and the god from the Norse pantheon it is named for).

And Wednesday isn't the only old god scratching a living in America. In fact, there are loads of them. This is the central conceit of Gaiman's book, and a rather clever one it is. America is a nation made up of settlement by a vast number of the world's peoples. What if each fresh round of colonisation or settlement brought with it its own gods from the old country, who took root in this fertile soil of the New World, creating a melange of home-from-home pantheons?

But Wednesday and his god buddies have a problem. No one really believes in them any more, and without belief they are practically nothing. Worse than that, there are new gods in America, and they have plenty of worshippers – the gods of TV and the internet, of shopping malls and credit cards, technological gods whose eyes glow with the green of vintage computer monitors. The new gods want the old guard out of the way. A war – or as we are more often told in the book, a storm – is coming.

American Gods is a chilly book for a beach read, I'll grant you. It's snowbound and icy, the narrative straddling Christmas, and the rumble of thunder is never far away. But it's big and epic and when you do drag yourself out of its depths you never feel as glad to see the sun.

There's something raw about American Gods, too. It's a polished piece of writing, no doubt about that, but it has that simultaneous urgency and sprawl of a writer finding their feet. Gaiman's latest novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, is a perfectly-formed parcel of tight writing and economic plotting; American Gods spills over the edges of the page as Gaiman gives himself an almost runaway-truck freedom to pile anything and everything that tickles or interests him into the novel.

Shadow travels across America, learning about the gods and the war they are fighting, and it is at the same time an America we recognise – even if we have never been there – and an America that is secret and hidden. There's horror, perhaps prompting that marketing conference which decided to ally him with King, but there's also a lot of hope, a lot of fun and a sense of wonder which makes this a joyful, satisfying and enriching experience.

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American Gods Is a Bizarre, Dazzling Show

American Gods is one of the strangest series ever to air on American television. I say that with the authority of a critic who put Hannibal , the last series from American Gods co-producer Bryan Fuller, in the number-one spot on his top-ten list two years running . Hannibal was an aggressively strange show: bloody, perverse, and intellectually playful, and more interested in dreamlike atmosphere and imagery than in traditional storytelling. The influence of three Davids — Lynch, Fincher, and Cronenberg — was always apparent, and there were times, especially in season three, when Hannibal got as close to abstraction as a series with a plot and characters could get. As a piece of storytelling, American Gods makes Hannibal look like The Andy Griffith Show .

The pilot starts with a prologue about a band of Norse explorers making landfall in the Americas and suffering horribly, turning, in desperation, to supernatural forces that seem to ignore them. The first four episodes all have prologues like this: little self-contained stories about the relationship between humans and gods, or prayers and actions, that are thematically adjacent to the main show but exactly a part of it. They’re parables attached to a show which itself has the feel of a parable.

The main series takes its sweet time introducing its main character, Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle of The 100 ), a man who gets released from prison at the same time that he learns his wife Laura (Emily Browning) has died in a car wreck. In time, Shadow Moon will fall into the orbit of Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane), a rascally con man who waxes philosophical about everything under the sun (a perfect role for McShane).

The show then becomes a picaresque narrative, and at times a straight-up road movie, with Mr. Wednesday and Shadow Moon crisscrossing the United States in a big, old American car, contacting various supernatural figures and having conversations with them. These include a trio of sisters with supernatural powers, separated by decades of age and led by Zorya Vechernyaya (90-year-old Cloris Leachman); Czernobog (Peter Stormare), Zorya’s roommate, a chain-smoking slaughterhouse worker who’s nostalgic for the days when he used to kill livestock with a sledgehammer; Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber), a belligerent Irishman who challenges Shadow Moon to a fistfight; and a seductive woman ( Hannibal alum Gillian Anderson) who appears to Shadow from a bank of TVs in a superstore in black and white, in the guise of Lucille Ball.

I’m not sure how much else I want to tell you about the plot — and not because surprise is essential to American Gods. This series, which is adapted by Fuller and Michael Green (co-screenwriter of Logan ) from Neil Gaiman’s popular novel , will probably have a Game of Thrones– type viewership, mixing newbies with a large percentage of viewers who know everything that’s going to happen already and are just watching to see how the show will dramatize things.

More to the point, this does not strike me as a series that cares very much about the “whoa!” factor. I haven’t read Gaiman’s book and studiously avoided descriptions of it, because I wanted to come to the show with virgin eyes and ears. As a result, I didn’t experience any of the revelations, which feel incidental and sly, as anything other than accessories to the show’s unique aesthetic, which is all about what’s happening in the moment. Fuller and Green and their directors — Hannibal veteran David Slade, in particular — structure every episode so that it feels like a bunch of loosely connected short stories with recurring characters. Some have preexisting relationships with each other (like Mr. Wednesday and Mad Sweeney), while others just seem to mysteriously appear in the story, like cameo players. The most striking of the latter is Orlando Jones’s dandyish Mr. Nancy, who’s at the center of the second episode’s prologue, speaking to slaves shackled in the belly of a ship in the 17th century. (Skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to know what’s really going on.)

We soon learn that we’re witnessing the first stirrings of a war between the old gods — including Odin, Mr. Wednesday’s real identity, and Jesus, who shows up in a later episode in the guise of Jeremy Davies — and the new gods of technology, industry, and commerce. (Anderson’s character, Media, is one of the new gods.) Mr. Wednesday’s goal is to get the old gang back together to battle the new gods for control of the universe and reassert their supremacy. The premise of the novel is that gods actually do exist , but only because people believe in them; because belief in the old gods is on the wane — human thoughts being preoccupied by technology and electronic images — the old gods themselves are also on the wane.

Despite the momentous stakes, none of the characters on American Gods seem particularly obsessed with the fate of humankind and the universe, and the show doesn’t seem obsessed with it, either. It treats the premise as an excuse to serve up eccentric characters engaged in conversation or delivering very long, Tarantino-esque monologues. (Czernobog’s description of the old days at the slaughterhouse is a horrendous standout.) Every now and then, you get a burst of action that would seem unspeakably brutal if the show didn’t abstract the blood and gore to the point where you feel like you’re looking at a self-aware gallery exhibition. There’s a moment in a fourth-episode fight where a supernaturally powerful combatant kicks a man in the crotch and splits him in half vertically, so that his skull and spine fly up into the air; the image is so ridiculous that I laughed at it, and I’m fairly sure I was supposed to.

There are also a number of extended sex scenes, one involving a genie and a salesman, that are much more emotionally intense than anything in Starz’s Spartacus franchise. The show’s aesthetic puts you in the moment — in the middle of the action, as it were — rather than giving you a safe distance by dicing the encounter into a montage of gorgeously toned bodies. When it comes to nudity, Fuller is an equal-opportunity showman: Yetide Badaki’s sex goddess Bilquis goes full-frontal with a variety of partners (including Joel Murray, a.k.a. Mad Men ’s Freddy Rumsen, of all people), but the show is much more of a showcase for the male physique. In fact, it might be the first commercial drama to feature a penis (often erect) in every episode. Why that isn’t a pledge to viewers in ads is beyond me.

Given Fuller’s increasingly voluptuous and polymorphous sense of spectacle over the years, this seems all of a piece. There were scenes in Hannibal ’s second and third seasons that made blood, food, and unclothed bodies seem like alternating courses in the same never-ending feast. The close-ups of Hannibal Lecter’s culinary creations, his handwork as a killer, and his rivals’ gruesome gallery installations built of human bodies were all lit and shot in ways that stylized them and made them seem like parts of the same continuum. That’s the case here, too. Close-ups of poker chips, quarters, gold coins, blood, severed limbs, goulash, hardboiled eggs, dandelion stems, and rain-soaked earth are gorgeous on their own terms, but they feel like propositions as well as images — attempts to articulate a worldview that cannot be fully explained with words.

There’s also the possibility that Fuller, Green, and company don’t have anything to say, but are having a great time saying it anyway. Just as humans have to take a leap of faith to believe in the unseen and unverifiable, so, too, do viewers of American Gods have to decide to believe that the show is leading somewhere that will justify the time spent watching it and wondering what in the ever-loving hell is going on. There are points when the whole series seems to take its cues from Mr. Wednesday, who tells Shadow, “You can’t weave the stories that are necessary for belief unless you have a personality.” Mr. Wednesday is a god, but he is also a con man.

After watching the first four episodes, I can say that I don’t love American Gods the way I loved Hannibal . This is partly because Hannibal , for all its cool bloodletting and prankish humor, was a much warmer series — no doubt because of the physically unconsummated love between Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal and Hugh Dancy’s Will Graham. The relationship between those two characters and the individual cases they investigated served as through lines connecting all the blowout scenes of horror, violence, and seduction. American Gods is deliberately disjointed, like tracks on an album. There are times when the show seems more interested in parsing ephemeral moments in the here-and-now than contemplating the big issues. The more beguiling moments involve bits of what might be called barroom philosophy, such as Shadow Moon saying that “all the best drinks have self-defining names,” or Media lamenting people’s increasing inability to concentrate on one thing at a time. “They hold a smaller screen in their laps or in the palm of their hands so they don’t get bored watching the big one,” she says. Watch American Gods on a big screen, if possible, and turn the small ones off.

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AMERICAN GODS

by Neil Gaiman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 19, 2001

A magical mystery tour through the mythologies of all cultures, a unique and moving love story—and another winner for the...

An ex-convict is the wandering knight-errant who traverses the wasteland of Middle America, in this ambitious, gloriously funny, and oddly heartwarming latest from the popular fantasist ( Stardust , 1999, etc.).

Released from prison after serving a three-year term, Shadow is immediately rocked by the news that his beloved wife Laura has been killed in an automobile accident. While en route to Indiana for her funeral, Shadow meets an eccentric businessman who calls himself Wednesday (a dead giveaway if you’re up to speed on your Norse mythology), and passively accepts the latter’s offer of an imprecisely defined job. The story skillfully glides onto and off the plane of reality, as a series of mysterious encounters suggest to Shadow that he may not be in Indiana anymore—or indeed anywhere on Earth he recognizes. In dreams, he’s visited by a grotesque figure with the head of a buffalo and the voice of a prophet—as well as by Laura’s rather alarmingly corporeal ghost. Gaiman layers in a horde of other stories whose relationships to Shadow’s adventures are only gradually made clear, while putting his sturdy protagonist through a succession of tests that echo those of Arthurian hero Sir Gawain bound by honor to surrender his life to the malevolent Green Knight, Orpheus braving the terrors of Hades to find and rescue the woman he loves, and numerous other archetypal figures out of folklore and legend. Only an ogre would reveal much more about this big novel’s agreeably intricate plot. Suffice it to say that this is the book that answers the question: When people emigrate to America, what happens to the gods they leave behind?

Pub Date: June 19, 2001

ISBN: 0-380-97365-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001

FANTASY | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

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by Dan Watters & Neil Gaiman ; illustrated by Max Fiumara & Sebastian Fiumara

by Si Spurrier & Neil Gaiman ; illustrated by Bilquis Evely

by Neil Gaiman

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New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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THE PRIORY OF THE ORANGE TREE

by Samantha Shannon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 2019

A celebration of fantasy that melds modern ideology with classic tropes. More of these dragons, please.

After 1,000 years of peace, whispers that “the Nameless One will return” ignite the spark that sets the world order aflame.

No, the Nameless One is not a new nickname for Voldemort. Here, evil takes the shape of fire-breathing dragons—beasts that feed off chaos and imbalance—set on destroying humankind. The leader of these creatures, the Nameless One, has been trapped in the Abyss for ages after having been severely wounded by the sword Ascalon wielded by Galian Berethnet. These events brought about the current order: Virtudom, the kingdom set up by Berethnet, is a pious society that considers all dragons evil. In the East, dragons are worshiped as gods—but not the fire-breathing type. These dragons channel the power of water and are said to be born of stars. They forge a connection with humans by taking riders. In the South, an entirely different way of thinking exists. There, a society of female mages called the Priory worships the Mother. They don’t believe that the Berethnet line, continued by generations of queens, is the sacred key to keeping the Nameless One at bay. This means he could return—and soon. “Do you not see? It is a cycle.” The one thing uniting all corners of the world is fear. Representatives of each belief system—Queen Sabran the Ninth of Virtudom, hopeful dragon rider Tané of the East, and Ead Duryan, mage of the Priory from the South—are linked by the common goal of keeping the Nameless One trapped at any cost. This world of female warriors and leaders feels natural, and while there is a “chosen one” aspect to the tale, it’s far from the main point. Shannon’s depth of imagination and worldbuilding are impressive, as this 800-pager is filled not only with legend, but also with satisfying twists that turn legend on its head. Shannon isn’t new to this game of complex storytelling. Her Bone Season novels ( The Song Rising , 2017, etc.) navigate a multilayered society of clairvoyants. Here, Shannon chooses a more traditional view of magic, where light fights against dark, earth against sky, and fire against water. Through these classic pairings, an entirely fresh and addicting tale is born. Shannon may favor detailed explication over keeping a steady pace, but the epic converging of plotlines at the end is enough to forgive.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-63557-029-8

Page Count: 848

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | FANTASY | EPIC FANTASY

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, “american gods” wants to be your new tv religion.

“The world is either crazy or you are—they’re both solid options.” For years, Hollywood has grappled with how to adapt Neil Gaiman ’s beloved, epic novel about power, religion, faith, and general insanity known as “American Gods.” Many people looked into bringing it to the big or small screen, and realized how difficult that would be. The book not only features many elements that some would call unfilmable—a female God who now takes a role as a prostitute and consumes people with her vagina, along with numerous asides and references to reimagined mythology—but it has a tone that does not make for typical entertainment. Thank Gods for Bryan Fuller. Working with Michael Green (the suddenly-hot scribe behind “ Logan ” and “Blade Runner 2049”), Fuller has grafted Gaiman’s vision with his own sublimely strange sense of visual composition, honed on “ Hannibal ,” one of the best programs of the ‘10s. The result is like nothing you have ever seen before. It will be as divisive as anything on TV this year—programs this strange often are—but it reminded me of the first time I saw a little show that’s returning next month, David Lynch ’s “Twin Peaks.” It is that stridently daring, unique, and unapologetically bizarre. You won’t be able to turn away.

“American Gods” opens with a parable of Vikings stuck on a beach. Moving forward into the brush means death by a thousand arrows. But there’s no wind to get them to another island. And so they increasingly escalate their activities to get God’s attention to blow them in the right direction. It starts with prayer; it moves to sacrifice; it gets to all-out war. Are we, as a race, just trying to get our creator’s attention? Are we all just kids begging our parent to look at us? The first three scenes of the new season offer similar philosophical food for thought. The second chapter opens with a stunning piece of work by Orlando Jones as Mr. Nancy (a play on Anansi), a God who encourages a slave ship to burn it down by telling them how fucked they are for the next few centuries. And the opening of episode three tops them all. “American Gods” is a show that already feels like it’s topping itself from beat to beat. I’ve seen four episodes, and liked each one more than the one before. Fuller’s work has always had that kind of cumulative power.

You may have noticed that I’ve avoided the typical plot synopsis. “American Gods” does too. Fuller takes his time with the plot of the novel, moving around and back, taking pieces from here, expanding on ideas from there. The show opens largely the same, with a convict named Shadow Moon ( Ricky Whittle ) being released from prison a few days early after his wife Laura ( Emily Browning ) dies in a car accident. On the way home, he runs into a mysterious fellow named Mr. Wednesday ( Ian McShane ), who hires him as a bodyguard/advisor/something. They hit the road to … well, it’s not really clear yet. There are other Gods sprinkled throughout the show, including appearances by Peter Stormare as a violent one and Gillian Anderson as, well, you just have to see it (she has an appearance in the second episode that stands among the most visually striking things I’ve ever seen on TV.) Once again, Fuller finds fascinating combinations when it comes to casting, even bringing Dane Cook and Crispin Glover into the cast.

To say that “American Gods” intends to twist the way you traditionally approach television would be an understatement. It’s not just in the approach to storytelling that allows for asides with characters we know we’re likely to never see again—almost like chapters in a book that diverge from the main narrative—but in the visual and aural approaches as well. Notice how much Fuller and his team, including the great director David Slade (a vet of “Hannibal” and the film “ Hard Candy ”), use jazz and even atonal, Jonny Greenwood-esque compositions to play with their rhythms. It’s a show designed to keep you confused. To that end, there are times near the beginning where it almost feels too clean visually, and too playful, but either I got attuned to it or it improved by episode three, when it really clicks in. And then episode four moves back in time and rewires your expectations yet again.

“You can’t weave the stories that are necessary for life unless you have a little personality.” “American Gods” will be an overload of personality for some people. And yet there’s more powerful, memorable ideas and images in these first four episodes than most shows contain in their entire runs. It’s a series that defies traditional description or viewing. As Anderson’s character says to Shadow Moon, “Don’t fight gravity.” This show is gravity. 

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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American Gods Mass Market Paperback – April 1, 2002

Shadow is a man with a past. But now he wants nothing more than to live a quiet life with his wife and stay out of trouble. Until he learns that she's been killed in a terrible accident.

Flying home for the funeral, as a violent storm rocks the plane, a strange man in the seat next to him introduces himself. The man calls himself Mr. Wednesday, and he knows more about Shadow than is possible.

He warns Shadow that a far bigger storm is coming. And from that moment on, nothing will ever be the same...

• Book 1 of 2 American Gods
• Print length 624 pages
• Language English
• Publisher HarperTorch
• Publication date April 1, 2002
• Dimensions 4.19 x 1.56 x 6.75 inches
• ISBN-10 0380789035
• ISBN-13 978-0380789030
• Lexile measure 840L
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

From the publisher, about the author.

Neil Gaiman is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, Anansi Boys, The Graveyard Book, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), The Ocean at the End of the Lane , and The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains ; the Sandman series of graphic novels; and the story collections Smoke and Mirrors , Fragile Things , and Trigger Warning . He is the winner of numerous literary honors, including the Hugo, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy awards, and the Newbery and Carnegie Medals. Originally from England, he now lives in the United States. He is Professor in the Arts at Bard College.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperTorch; Reprint edition (April 1, 2002)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 624 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0380789035
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0380789030
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 840L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.19 x 1.56 x 6.75 inches
• #2,713 in Folklore (Books)
• #7,190 in Fantasy Action & Adventure
• #10,252 in Paranormal & Urban Fantasy (Books)

About the author

Neil gaiman.

Neil Gaiman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books, including Norse Mythology, Neverwhere, and The Graveyard Book. Among his numerous literary awards are the Newbery and Carnegie medals, and the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Will Eisner awards. He is a Professor in the Arts at Bard College.

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An Appraisal

John Barth, a Novelist Who Found Possibility in a ‘Used-Up’ Form

By merrily using fiction to dissect itself, he was at the vanguard of a movement that defined a postwar American style.

By Dave Kim

Dave Kim is an editor at the Book Review.

Nobody likes the comic who explains his own material, but the writer John Barth, who died on Tuesday , had a way of making explanations — of gags, of stories, of the whole creative enterprise — sing louder and funnier and truer than punchlines. The maxim “Show, don’t tell” had little purchase with him. In novels, short stories and essays, through an astoundingly prolific six-decade career, he ran riot over literary rules and conventions, even as he displayed, with meticulous discipline, mastery of and respect for them.

He was styled a postmodernist, an awkwardly fitting title that only just managed to cover his essential attributes, like a swimsuit left too long in the dryer. But it meant that much of what Barth was doing — cheekily recycling dusty forms, shining klieg lights on the artificiality of art, turning the tyranny of plot against itself — had a name, a movement.

For many years, starting in the 1960s, he was at the vanguard of this movement, alongside writers like Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis. He declared that all paths for the novel had already been taken, and then blazed new ones for generations of awe-struck followers. He showed us how writing works by letting us peer into its machinery, and reminded us that our experience of the world will always be dictated by the instruments we have to observe and record it. While never abandoning narrative, he found endless joy in picking apart its elements, and in the process helped define a postwar American style.

Were Barth the author of this article, for example, he might pause here to point out that the lines above constitute what journalists like to call the nut graf , an early paragraph that provides larger context for the topic at hand and tries to establish its importance — and is sometimes wedged in last-minute by a harried writer or editor ordered to “elevate” a story or “give it sweep.” Then Barth might explain why this one is lousy, why the whole business of nut grafs is more or less absurd.

The constructive disruption, the literary public service announcement: It became something of a signature for Barth, and it’s best expressed in his story collection “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968). The title piece, a masterwork of metafiction, follows a teenage boy lurching about the revolving discs and mirrored walls of an amusement-park fun house, where he realizes, dolefully, that he is better suited to construct such contrivances than experience them.

Throughout, a comically pedantic narrator critiques the very tale he’s telling by identifying the flashy tricks of the “funhouse” that is fiction: symbolism, theme, sensory detail, resolution. The story is simultaneously a rigorous analysis, vivid example and ruthless dismantling of how literature operates.

“Is anything more tiresome, in fiction, than the problems of sensitive adolescents?” the narrator asks, in his fiction about a sensitive adolescent. “And it’s all too long and rambling.”

David Foster Wallace called the collection a “sacred text,” even drafting one of his stories in the margins of his copy. Although he later, in an act of literary parricide, denounced his hero as a stagnant has-been, Barth’s influence is unmistakable in Wallace’s work, as it is in that of so many others, including Zadie Smith, Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, George Saunders and David Mitchell — writers who hauled postmodernism off its ivory tower, who integrated Barth’s fourth-wall breaches, parodic masquerades or typographical pyrotechnics into more accessible, more sincere and, fine, more marketable narratives.

Barth himself was a writer who wore his influences on his sleeve, though he was careful to make his tributes his own, often with an awl-sharp irony. “You do not mistake your navigation stars for your destination,” he said in a 2001 interview with the critic Michael Silverblatt. “These are compass points that you steer by, but you’re not trying to be Joyce or Beckett or Nabokov or Calvino or Borges just because you steer by those stars. They help you fix your own position.”

In 1967, he wrote an essay called “ The Literature of Exhaustion ,” a state-of-the-union address for Western letters that would come to be known, to Barth’s befuddlement, as a manifesto for postmodernism. It is one of those loosely read, perennially misinterpreted early-career works that both forge their writers’ reputations and drive them nuts for the rest of their lives.

In it, he points to the “used-upness” of literary forms, the exhaustion of creative possibilities, as a rousing opportunity for new methods based on pastiche and revival — “by no means necessarily a cause for despair,” he insisted. But many readers still took it as a death knell for the novel. Barth had to write a follow-up years later to set the record straight.

Much of his raw material actually came from writers of classic texts, not the modern and postmodern navigation stars he steered by. He was Dante reworking the “Aeneid” into “The Divine Comedy” — if Dante were a shiny-pated, bespectacled Marylander with a police-detective mustache. “The Sot-Weed Factor” (1960) is an epic imitation of the 18th-century bildungsroman, something A.I. bots might aspire to if the prompt were, say, “‘Tom Jones’ plus ‘Tristram Shandy,’ but hornier.” (It’s great.) His 2004 story collection, “The Book of Ten Nights and a Night,” is a “Decameron” set in the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Scheherazade, whom Barth called his “literary patron saint,” is a regular presence in his work.

And, of course, there’s Barth’s opus “Giles Goat-Boy” (1966), a bonkers Cold War allegory that draws from the Bible, “Oedipus Rex,” “Don Quixote” and “Ulysses,” among other works. I tried to summarize its many forking paths for a curious bartender once and started to feel dizzy midway through. A bitterly divided college campus is overrun by a tyrannical computer system called WESCAC, and the only one who can save humanity is a boy named George Giles, who was raised as a goat and somehow turns out to be the offspring of WESCAC and a virgin named Lady Creamhair. (It’s great.)

Giles tries his best to live up to the mythic hero archetype, but soon learns, over and over, that simply being human is complicated enough. For all of Barth’s outrageous experiments, he always seemed to find his way back to the basic moral question that every great fiction writer has tried to wrangle: How should one be?

His second novel, “The End of the Road” (1958), is a profound deliberation on the dominant Western philosophy of its time, existentialism, which Barth, in a Camus-like story of a marital affair, first seems to value and then exposes as obscenely inadequate. Anchoring even his most arcane metafictions are recognizable characters who try to commit to a principle or an identity — and often fail spectacularly.

In this way, Barth was closer to the comforts of traditional fiction than he was given credit for. A true postmodernist, he wrote in 1980, keeps “one foot in fantasy, one in objective reality.” His books are long — the novels tend to gallivant far past the 500-page mark — and laborious. But like an abstract painter proving he still has some realist portraiture left in him, he could sometimes play it straight and write fiction that, as he put it, “just tells itself without ever-forever reminding us that it’s words on paper.” Take a peek at “Ambrose His Mark” (from “Lost in the Funhouse”) and “Toga Party” (from his 2008 collection “The Development”) for superb examples.

But Barth’s most memorable writing remains the stuff that works on both levels: the gently rising and falling slopes of narrative and the zany mirror maze of self-reflexivity. You get the sense that he found the latter a wearying realm to read in, let alone write in, but couldn’t help veering into it, that the phoniness of the whole endeavor, including his own persona as the artist, had to be accounted for. “It’s particularly disquieting to suspect not only that one is a fictional character,” he wrote, “but that the fiction one’s in — the fiction one is — is quite the sort one least prefers.”

Reading Barth is like taking a cross-country flight while sitting in the cockpit with the pilot, a journey made more thrilling by our observation of the mechanisms that make it possible: We can stare in awe at the instrument panels, or just look out the window. But, through it all, his impossible desire to be his own reader, a naïve experiencer of his own narrative, never waned. One imagines the maestro himself snapping his fingers impatiently at the text. “Enough with the diversions,” he might say. “On with the story!”