American Gods

Neil Gaiman

It is hard to tell, from the Gaiman resources on the net, exactly how many novels for adults Gaiman has written on his own. Two? Three? More? In any case, Gaiman spent the five years between his novel Neverwhere and this one very constructively, it would seem. All the many flaws of Neverwhere have disappeared, and we are left with a stunning achievement, perhaps the first (horror? fantasy? What is this, anyway?) novel of its ilk that can be called truly original since Kathe Koja unleashed The Cipher upon us over a decade ago.

Shadow is a man just into his thirties who's spent the last three years in prison. He's released a couple of days early thanks to the death of his wife. While flying home to attend her funeral, Shadow meets a man who calls himself Mister Wednesday. Wednesday tells Shadow a storm is coming, the offers him a job. Things are all downhill from there.

Well-drawn characters, a perfect pace, plots and subplots by the score, red herrings, masterful clue-dropping, double-crosses, triple-crosses, and of course, a plethora of gods, brought to America on the heels of their believers and left to be abandoned. The prose is more readable than that in Neverwhere, which was also a pleasant surprise; this one feels like it needs to be a movie, not like it was written from a movie script (which, in essence, Neverwhere was). There's nothing wrong with the book, save a minor editorial glitch (a barefoot Shadow at one point reaches down and takes off his shoes). It's somewhat ironic, but ultimately understandable, that a book that goes to the heart of America so well was written by a British author. As one of the other characters observes to Shadow early on in the book, no other country spends as much time looking for its soul as America. Perhaps we're better off letting others look for it. Gaiman has certainly done a more than capable job at finding it.

The first of the year's reads to be a shoo-in for the top 25 of 2003.