I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a book as miserable as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Not the writing which was excellent. Miserable in the sense of truly unpleasant, disquieting, and disturbing.
Anyhew, American Gods starts with our protagonist, Shadow, in jail counting the small number of days until he’s paroled and can join his wife. He gets out early only because she dies in a car accident. Things only go sideways from there.
American Gods’ main thesis, that America is not a good place for gods, but there’s plenty of them stuck here and doing quite badly as their worship fades, is captivating. These older, down on their luck gods are balanced with a set of newfangled deities of the sort you’d expect from our techno-driven, consumerist culture: Technology, Media, The Markets, etc. An odyssey for Shadow ensues, introducing us to various of these magical entities, major and minor. Drama is generated from an oncoming storm of war between the old and new gods. As is normal for this style of tale, not everything is as it appears.
The plot is complex, occasionally confused with dreamlike episodes that are a little hard to parse and put in context. But it moves well and leads to a satisfying, if somewhat anti-climatic resolution. All of the major characters are flawed, but fleshed out to a satisfying level. Thinking back, fresh from finishing, the tone is amazingly consistently, melancholy, low key, droll, even quite morbid and grisly at times. There’s bits of humor, but only of the gallows variety. Which is most appropriate. I found myself snorting occasionally, but never laughing out loud.
Gaiman is an interesting author relative to my tastes. It took me three tries to start and finish Neverwhere, but I really appreciated it after the effort. I’ll talk more about Anansi Boys in a later post, but that gets high marks too. I think of the three, I liked American Gods the least, it really is discomforting in a number of places, but I can still recommend it to others. Definitely worth the time.