Shadow Moon was released from prison one week early to attend his wife’s funeral. As his wife and his best friend, who supposedly would take care of his new life after prison, were both dead, Shadow felt he had nothing to go back to. It was in this context that Shadow met a mysterious old man, Mr. Wednesday, who offered him a job as errand boy.
Shadow soon discovered that Mr. Wednesday was the God Odin, the All-Father. Mr. Wednesday’s quest was to reunite all old Gods who, like him, were brought to U.S.A. in the heads of their believers, for the great battle against the modern Gods of Internet, TV, credit cards, and all modern junk. And so Shadow started the journey in the hallucinatory sub-world of the ancient and decadent Gods, and the new plastic ones.
The allegory in American Gods is faithfully followed. America is a bad ground for Gods. The ancient ones come from far away, they are the rooted in people’s culture, and, although people keep following some old traditions, the Gods became forgotten. The new Gods are highly venerated by people but they have a short life-span, because they are constantly replaced by new ones.
American Gods is highly entertaining. Some details, like the dialogues between Shadow and his (zombie) wife are remarkable. However, it doesn’t stand the comparison with Neverwhere, by the same author.
I think the problem is that after presenting the context and the problem, in the first chapters, the rhythm of the novel slows down, and it just bursts again in the last third of the book. In the middle I got that dreadful feeling that the-same-could-be-said-in-less-words. And the ending doesn’t compensate the middle part.
This doesn’t mean the book is boring and not worth reading. Maybe Neil Gaiman set the scale too high when he wrote Neverwhere…
[...] – American Gods, Neil Gaiman (Der Wanderer’s Blog) [...]