Product Description:

American Gods is Neil Gaiman's best and most ambitious novel yet, a scary, strange, and hallucinogenic road-trip story wrapped around a deep examination of the American spirit. Gaiman tackles everything from the onslaught of the information age to the meaning of death, but he doesn't sacrifice the razor-sharp plotting and narrative style he's been delivering since his Sandman days.

Shadow gets out of prison early when his wife is killed in a car crash. At a loss, he takes up with a mysterious character called Wednesday, who is much more than he appears. In fact, Wednesday is an old god, once known as Odin the All-father, who is roaming America rounding up his forgotten fellows in preparation for an epic battle against the upstart deities of the Internet, credit cards, television, and all that is wired. Shadow agrees to help Wednesday, and they whirl through a psycho-spiritual storm that becomes all too real in its manifestations. For instance, Shadow's dead wife Laura keeps showing up, and not just as a ghost--the difficulty of their continuing relationship is by turns grim and darkly funny, just like the rest of the book.

Armed only with some coin tricks and a sense of purpose, Shadow travels through, around, and underneath the visible surface of things, digging up all the powerful myths Americans brought with them in their journeys to this land as well as the ones that were already here. Shadow's road story is the heart of the novel, and it's here that Gaiman offers up the details that make this such a cinematic book--the distinctly American foods and diversions, the bizarre roadside attractions, the decrepit gods reduced to shell games and prostitution. 'This is a bad land for Gods,' says Shadow.

More than a tourist in America, but not a native, Neil Gaiman offers an outside-in and inside-out perspective on the soul and spirituality of the country--our obsessions with money and power, our jumbled religious heritage and its societal outcomes, and the millennial decisions we face about what's real and what's not. --Therese Littleton

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: 3.94 out of 5 stars

Rating:

- a solid story
I've read comparisons of Neil Gaiman with Stephen King. The comparison, I think, is unfair. Both are good storytellers with a deft mastery of language and imagery. However, unlike King, Gaiman does a much better job at taking us into that which lies beneath. King only shows what is there (at least, what is there in his fantastic horrible world). Gaiman takes us behind the scenes -- even, in this book, referring to it as Backstage.

That difference may seem trivial, but it is very important. It makes Gaiman's work more readable, more interesting, more thought-provoking.

Gaiman loves looking at that which lies beneath, and "American Gods" is no exception. This time around, he examines American belief in the form of the gods that were brought to this new land but, ultimately, ... Read More

Rating:

- Best book I have read this year
I think I'm not prone to hype anything and I've used the 5 stars sparsely in the past, but I can't understand the negative reviews I found here. I haven't been a particular rabid fan of Mr Gaiman in the past, actually not having read the Sandman comics, but I loved Good Omens. I tried his two fairy tales and these were the ones that felt not as imaginative as one could have hoped for.

American Gods, on the other hand, is an epic novel of wonderful proportions. Anyone with an interest in fantastic, mystic stories and all fans of classic Americana should love it. I especially loved the way not everything is explained here, how small hints are given out, understandable maybe only to people from a certain culture (Hinzelman comes to mind). I sure didn't understand everything, but then again, ... Read More

Rating:

- More than a Great Book
I've read many reviews complaining about the pace and the one dimensional characters of American Gods and I'd have to disagree. I read this book last year and, frankly, it's one of the best books I've read in a long time. The pace is a little slow, sure, but really think about it, this book gets really involved, and if it didn't go a little slow, after you'd finished the book, you'd be sitting there thinking, "Ummm... what?"

For, me this wasn't one of those books that you can eat up in a day or two and have the same regard for it. I read it over the span of two and a half weeks; each time I picked it up, I looked forward to a nice, relaxing/ not really that brain relaxing/ more like "Wow, that was awesome" at times, reading but I digress. This is the book that first introduced me to Gaiman, ... Read More

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