American Gods Book Review: Neil Gaiman Drove Across America with Every God Who Ever Lived

Rating: ★★★★★

"American Gods" Book Review:

Neil Gaiman asked a question that nobody else thought to ask: what happens to the gods when nobody believes in them anymore? The answer, it turns out, is they get jobs. They drive taxis. They run funeral homes. They hustle and con and drink and try to remember what it felt like to matter. And one of them is assembling an army.

Shadow Moon is released from prison to find that his wife has died in a car crash — in the car of his best friend, with whom she was having an affair. He's recruited by Mr. Wednesday, a charismatic con man who turns out to be Odin, the All-Father, who is traveling across America gathering the old gods — brought to the country by immigrants over centuries — for a war against the new gods of media, technology, and consumerism.

Gaiman's genius is in the details. Each god is specifically, physically grounded in their American context. Anansi runs a bar in Florida. Czernobog works in a Chicago slaughterhouse. Easter has become a brand. The old gods are fading because belief is the only currency that matters, and America has new things to worship now. The road trip structure gives Gaiman an excuse to explore the strangest corners of American geography and mythology, and he writes every setting with a specificity that makes you feel like you've been there.

Shadow is a deliberately passive protagonist, which frustrates some readers. He observes more than he acts. He endures more than he resists. But I think that's the point. Shadow is America itself — absorbing everything, claiming everything, changing everything it touches while being changed in return.

This won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Locus Award. It was adapted into a Starz TV series. The tenth anniversary edition, with Gaiman's preferred text, is the definitive version.

Five stars. This is the great American road trip novel disguised as a fantasy, or maybe the other way around.

If You Liked American Gods, Try:

• Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman — If you want more Gaiman, this underground-London fantasy is faster and more focused. Same imagination, different setting.

• The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker — Immigrant gods in early-1900s New York. Same intersection of mythology and the American immigrant experience.

• Circe by Madeline Miller — A god trying to find meaning when the world has moved on. Same loneliness, same beauty.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

An 8 year old from Iowa raids his neighbors' pantries for cereal sweepstakes pieces, cleans toilets backstage at a Tony-winning musical, surfs in Hawaii until a volcano goddess curses him, and buries his best friend at twenty-seven. Part con-artist origin story, part elegy for every American who was told to dream big and handed a rigged game.

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