Reading List: American Gods - Neil Gaiman

Hello readers and welcome back to another installment of the Reading List. As mentioned previously I have tried to work in more BIPOC and female authors on this list, but I also have a pretty big backlog of “old white dudes” sitting on bookshelves around my apartment that I need to read to round out the list. To that end I decided to revisit an author I haven’t read for seven years, Neil Gaiman and his astonishing 2001 work American Gods.

A novel about gods and their devotees, this was an amazing story that kept me hooked throughout all of its over 500 pages. We first meet one of the two main characters, Shadow, as he is just getting out of prison for the crimes of robbing his former partners and beating them up. Shadow is a big guy, you see, and after he gets out of prison and thinks he is going home he meets the second main character Wednesday, who offers Shadow a job as a driver and bodyguard. While at first Shadow rebuffs him, after he learns the life he led before prison is no longer feasible (his wife and best friend died in a car accident) he takes the job. After a choice encounter with the first god Shadow receives a coin (Shadow’s into coin tricks too) that inadvertently brings his wife back to a sort of life and she ends up following him around the story until the very end. The story becomes a rollicking traveling tale, with Shadow and Wednesday visiting gods in Chicago and Cario, Illinois where Shadow briefly works as an undertaker’s apprentice. Wednesday later has Shadow deposited at the town of Lakeside, Wisconsin where he is supposed to lay low but where he meets some of the more interesting (almost all of them non-god) characters in the novel. Later a major character is killed (I won’t give it away) and that leads to an all consuming confrontation that haunts the rest of the book. Shadow volunteers to be there at the wake for this character which involves lashing himself to an ancient tree for days, where he ultimately dies and comes back to life reborn. Shadow also learns a major revelation while “dead.” And while the rest of the novel ends in what could be considered an anti-climactic way, I really enjoyed it. There are some wrap up (and to my mind, Stephen King-esque) bits in Lakeside to finish up the novel and then Shadow continues on his travels around the world.
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This book was an incredible read for many reasons, not least of which are Gaiman’s incredible knowledge of mythology and the gods which populate not just the main story but several asides as well. This is also a great “on the road” novel where we see the main characters Shadow and Wednesday (who turns out to be Odin in disguise, not to spoil too much) recruiting the old gods to fight against the new gods (represented by things like the internet and media). There are tons of characters and each one is interesting and memorable. I also happened to read the 2011 published edition of this novel which is considered “the author’s preferred text” and includes an additional twelve thousand words of content as well as some extras. And I was so into this book that I went back to the original inspiration for wanting to read it, an “American Gods novella” that was included in Fragile Things that I re-read to see what Shadow was up to in the years following the events of American Gods.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a masterful, fantastical read full of magic and mystery and good old fashioned traveling around the United States. While in my review of Fragile Things I noted not all of the stories were for me, American Gods definitely was and I would easily recommend it to anyone looking for a great tale full of great characters. Thanks as always for joining along with me on this reading adventure.