American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
Summary
Shadow is three days from the end of a prison sentence when he is released early, because his wife has died in a car accident. He learns at the funeral how she died and who was with her. Having nothing left, he takes a job as driver and bodyguard for a one eyed grifter calling himself Mr Wednesday, who knew his name before they met.
The premise is that gods came to America in the heads of the people who arrived, and were left behind when belief moved on. Odin, Anansi, Czernobog, a slaughterhouse worker who used to receive sacrifices, an Egyptian embalmer running a funeral parlour in Cairo, Illinois. They are broke, diminished and doing unglamorous work, and they are being pushed out by new gods of television, motorway and internet. Wednesday is recruiting for a war.
Shadow drives him around the country, through roadside attractions and small towns, doing coin tricks and asking few questions, and spends the best section of the book alone in a Wisconsin town called Lakeside where children disappear every winter.
The Lakeside chapters are the best writing Gaiman has done: a genuinely pleasant small town in a brutal winter, where Shadow is happy for the first time, and where the reason for the pleasantness is the worst thing in the book.
It is a road novel more than a plot, digressive by design, with standalone Coming to America chapters about how particular gods arrived, in the holds of ships and across a land bridge, which several readers rate above the main narrative.
The ending is deliberately anticlimactic, and readers expecting a war get an argument about what wars are for instead, which is the most common complaint about it.
Around six hundred pages and unhurried. Best for readers who want mythology walking around in a diner, and who are content to be told a story rather than raced through one.
Historical Context & Significance
American Gods won the 2002 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and the SFX Award, which is very nearly every major prize a fantasy novel could take in a single year and remains one of the widest sweeps on record.
Neil Gaiman was already famous for the Sandman comics, and this was the book that established him as a novelist for a general readership.
He is English and wrote it while living in the American midwest, which is why the novel is so attentive to the parts of the country that fiction usually drives past. A tenth anniversary edition restored roughly twelve thousand words the publisher had cut. Starz adapted it for television in 2017, and the series was cancelled after three seasons without finishing the story.