“An ex-convict named Shadow takes a job as bodyguard to a strange man named Wednesday and learns the old gods of immigration are still here, dying slow.”
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American Gods is Neil Gaiman's 2001 urban-fantasy novel, the Hugo and Nebula winner and one of the defining American genre novels of the 2000s. Shadow Moon, a recently widowed ex-convict from Indiana, takes a job as bodyguard and driver to a strange man calling himself Mr. Wednesday. Wednesday is on a road trip across the Midwest assembling allies for what he describes as a coming war: the old gods of European, African, and Asian immigration are dying slowly, supplanted by the new American gods of media, internet, and credit cards. Wednesday wants the old gods to fight.
Gaiman's project here is to read American religious and immigrant history as a coherent mythology, and the conceit pays off in ways most attempts at it do not. The roadside-attraction chapters (the House on the Rock, the geographic center of the continent, the Wisconsin Dells) treat tourist Americana as sites of genuine cosmological weight. The Shadow-and-Wednesday relationship is the structural anchor; the supporting cast (Sam Black Crow, Mr. Ibis the embalmer, Easter the spring goddess of the suburbs) is rendered with the literary care that distinguishes Gaiman from the genre fantasy mainstream. The 2017 Tenth Anniversary Edition is the version to read; it restores roughly 12,000 words cut from the 2001 publication.
Recommended for fans of contemporary urban fantasy that takes its mythology seriously (Charles de Lint's Newford books, Catherynne M. Valente's Deathless), for readers of literary speculative fiction (China Mieville's The City & the City, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell), and for anyone looking for books like American Gods in the immigrant-mythology tradition. Five stars and the right starting point for Gaiman's adult fiction. The 2017 Starz adaptation is uneven but worth attention.
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