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Neil Gaiman, “American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition”

By Talia Lavin

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I first fell in love with “American Gods” when I was fifteen. Neil Gaiman’s sprawling novel, from 2001, had influences that at the time I hadn’t really encountered—echoes of Tim O’Brien, Don DeLillo, and Stephen King, not to mention the mythologies it explicitly draws from—and that were completely exhilarating for a suburban teen-ager. I wanted to hunker down in the back seat with Shadow, the book’s taciturn protagonist, and Wednesday, the con-man god, and all the rest of the motley crew, and immerse myself in America’s long, rambling highways, as Gaiman, pictured at right, so patently had. Last year, when Starz aired a TV series based on the book, I liked some things—Ian McShane was the embodiment of the gruff, sly Wednesday—but the show’s fixation on slow, violin-scored rains of blood, and its general sacrifice of characterization for slick visuals, grew dull long before the season finale.

Feeling nostalgic, I downloaded the tenth-anniversary edition of the audiobook to my iPhone, ready to use the familiar tale to soothe me to sleep. Instead, it was more compelling than it had any right to be. From Gaiman’s mannered British interludes to the expert narration of Dennis Boutsikaris, Daniel Oreskes, Ron McLarty, and Sarah Jones, the audiobook rolls along with the delicious, strange rhythm of the road narrative it’s telling. Oreskes’s rumbling baritone deftly brings Shadow to life; McLarty is the perfect combination of wicked and winsome; and Boutsikaris’s earnest narration—he’s narrated more than a hundred audiobooks—gathers the whole unwieldy tapestry together. The effect of the audiobook, in comparison to the show, was a bit like finding that a well-rendered sketch can be far more evocative than a clumsily colored painting. I was surprised to find how well the book had aged, even if, from time to time, Gaiman’s ambitions outstrip his skill; spoken aloud, his stabs at slangy American dialogue wilt. Still, the audio edition of this book would be a fantastic soundtrack to a long drive over the open spaces of the United States, should you seek to find, in their grittiest corners, a hidden pantheon.

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AMERICAN GODS

by Neil Gaiman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 19, 2001

A magical mystery tour through the mythologies of all cultures, a unique and moving love story—and another winner for the...

An ex-convict is the wandering knight-errant who traverses the wasteland of Middle America, in this ambitious, gloriously funny, and oddly heartwarming latest from the popular fantasist ( Stardust , 1999, etc.).

Released from prison after serving a three-year term, Shadow is immediately rocked by the news that his beloved wife Laura has been killed in an automobile accident. While en route to Indiana for her funeral, Shadow meets an eccentric businessman who calls himself Wednesday (a dead giveaway if you’re up to speed on your Norse mythology), and passively accepts the latter’s offer of an imprecisely defined job. The story skillfully glides onto and off the plane of reality, as a series of mysterious encounters suggest to Shadow that he may not be in Indiana anymore—or indeed anywhere on Earth he recognizes. In dreams, he’s visited by a grotesque figure with the head of a buffalo and the voice of a prophet—as well as by Laura’s rather alarmingly corporeal ghost. Gaiman layers in a horde of other stories whose relationships to Shadow’s adventures are only gradually made clear, while putting his sturdy protagonist through a succession of tests that echo those of Arthurian hero Sir Gawain bound by honor to surrender his life to the malevolent Green Knight, Orpheus braving the terrors of Hades to find and rescue the woman he loves, and numerous other archetypal figures out of folklore and legend. Only an ogre would reveal much more about this big novel’s agreeably intricate plot. Suffice it to say that this is the book that answers the question: When people emigrate to America, what happens to the gods they leave behind?

Pub Date: June 19, 2001

ISBN: 0-380-97365-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001

FANTASY | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

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BOOK REVIEW

by Dan Watters & Neil Gaiman ; illustrated by Max Fiumara & Sebastian Fiumara

by Si Spurrier & Neil Gaiman ; illustrated by Bilquis Evely

by Neil Gaiman

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Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

BOOK TO SCREEN

DARK MATTER

by Blake Crouch ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 2016

Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.

A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.

Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.

Pub Date: July 26, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016

More by Blake Crouch

by Blake Crouch

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American Gods

By neil gaiman.

An imaginative story told in Neil Gaiman's immersive and dark style, 'American Gods' is also a commentary on America's complex relationship with foreign gods.

Article written by Ebuka Igbokwe

Bachelor's degree from Nnamdi Azikiwe University.

‘ American Gods ’ tells the story of Shadow, an ex-convict who is released on parole to find the world he expected to meet gone: his wife and his former boss whom he expects to give him are dead. He is recruited as a bodyguard by a mysterious figure who turns out to be a god preparing to battle other gods, and Shadow is ushered into a mind-bending fantasy where nothing is as it seems.

Neil Gaiman is an author of fantasy and speculative fiction and was born in England in 1960. He has written various novels including ‘ Neverwhere ,’ ‘ Anansi Boys ,’ and ‘ Ocean at the End of The Lane ’. He has also published fiction for children such as ‘ Coraline ,’ ‘ The Graveyard Book ’ and ‘ Stardust ,’ and the critically acclaimed comic book, ‘T he Sandman ’. Gaiman is a recipient of various awards for his writing, receiving the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards for ‘ American Gods ’ alone.

‘ American Gods ’ may start as a story about a war between gods, but it reads like more than that: American travelogue and road-trip story, horror, fantasy, detective fiction. It is an ambitious and sprawling narrative through which Neil Gaiman attempted to make sense of America and tell the things he discovered about America to Americans.

The central plot of the novel is intriguing and Gaiman’s execution of the story idea has great merit. Gaiman adapts different myths and legends in this modern-day drama to satisfying effect and explores cultural identities and the nature of belief and gods in the background of a fantasy-horror-mystery story. From the beginning, the narrative keeps up a vital energy, and the reader is immersed in a world of fantasy where abnormal events feel as if they fit. There is no border between genres and Neil Gaiman applies himself with free rein to tell a story without limitations.

The main problem a reader may find is that the story is fragmentary, and there seems to be little to link fragments of the story as one tale . While the Mike Ainsel storyline happens in the world and time of the war between the Old Gods and New Gods, the events seem to belong to two different stories.

Themes and Symbolism

The major theme explored in the story is the idea of gods manifested through the thoughts of man and was developed very convincingly. The Old Gods’ main problem stemmed from replenishing their lost glory and power when the people who used to worship them had forgotten them, and the New Gods’ ascendancy was a result of the ideas they represented gaining attention in the present. Other themes such as America as a melting pot, and the dissonance between what is apparent and what is real, are a metacommentary on the society. Gaiman does a fantastic job of showing how humans are manipulated into believing something as long as it seems honest, and how belief is man’s power and also his vulnerability. Also using Wednesday as an example, he shows how man’s belief is the god’s power but the dependence on this source of power is their weakness. A weak point in the novel is how it restates almost ad nauseam that America is a bad place for gods, but Jesus, Allah, and Yahweh, which are still worshipped in modern-day America are conspicuously absent. However, one can understand that the author refrained from this treatment out of respect for people’s religions.

Characterization

The cast of ‘American Gods’ is diverse and colorful, drawn from legends, myths, and contemporary sources. Each of these has their unique quirk and personality, from loud Mad Sweeney to stoic Shadow to vengeful Audrey to dour Czernobog, and this gives the narrative a lively feel as the interplay of these characters is a source of healthy tension and increases the realistic feel of it. But the novel does not escape a problem common to stories with a lot of characters : very few of them have any impact on the story and a lot do not carry their weight and seem only to provide a background. Also, you have a few who are tropes such as Samantha representing the manic pixie girl and Hinzelmann the kindly old man who is evil behind his lovely exterior.

The dialogue in ‘American Gods’ is rich with humor and wisdom and contains deep insights into the relationships between individuals as themselves and as integrated into a community of shared beliefs and identity. The talk is lively and moves the story along, too. However, some parts drag and sometimes a a character drones on that one wonders how the listener had not left them mid-speech and gone off. In a particular case, Samantha goes on for three paragraphs about belief when Shadow tells her that his story is pretty incredible.

Most of the story is set in modern-day America, while other brief digressions serve to give appropriate context to the narrative. This choice made the story very relatable. (The story’s fantastical elements interact with a solid and recognizable world) The sites where the action unfolds gain—when they match up to real-life places—a certain totemic weight. But a fight between gods might need a Mt. Olympus, and when cars, guns, and other quotidian items are used for the battle between gods, an epic quality is absent in the story.

Writing Style

Neil Gaiman’s style is literary and picturesque. He uses metaphor in a very eloquent and flowing way and strives to capture a mood that the reader can almost touch. It almost feels like one is seeing a movie when following his descriptions. People who prefer a direct narrative style may be turned off by his style.

American Gods: Gods Wars in Contemporary America

Book Title: American Gods

Book Description: 'American Gods' by Neil Gaiman is a riveting odyssey through a modern America where ancient gods clash with new deities born from technology and media. Gaiman's masterful storytelling weaves together of myth and reality, exploring the impact of faith and the fragility of gods in the American society. This layered narrative invites readers on a thrilling ride that blends fantasy, cultural commentary, and existential reflection.

Book Author: Neil Gaiman

Book Edition: 10th Anniversary Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: William Morrow

Date published: June 21, 2021

ISBN: 978-0062059888

Number Of Pages: 560

Lasting Effect on Reader

American Gods Review

‘ American Gods ‘ brings us to Neil Gaiman’s imagination of America, with a meta-analysis of its cultural quirks and particular personality traits, situated in the drama of a battle among personified deities.

immersive storytelling
engaging theme
evocative use of language
too many characters
too many genres
anticlimatic ending

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About Ebuka Igbokwe

Ebuka Igbokwe is the founder and former leader of a book club, the Liber Book Club, in 2016 and managed it for four years. Ebuka has also authored several children's books. He shares philosophical insights on his newsletter, Carefree Sketches and has published several short stories on a few literary blogs online.

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Book Reviews

This graphic novel brings gaiman's 'american gods' to chilly life.

Etelka Lehoczky

American Gods 2

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Scott Hampton has big work to do in My Ainsel , volume 2 of an ambitious, three-part graphic adaptation of Neil Gaiman's American Gods . Hampton's task duplicates the thorny one Gaiman set himself in the 2001 novel: To convince readers that figures out of myth and fable deserve deadly serious, unsentimental attention. American Gods shows these figures — Odin, Bast, Loki, even the personification of Easter – grappling with the failure of that attention. In the world Gaiman's drawn, as in our "real" one, the obliterating steamroller of modern technology has made the gods, demons and tricksters of ancient lore seem rickety and quaint. But as Gaiman shows, the truth is far otherwise.

The problem for the artist is how to depict Gaiman's characters without adding quaintness back in. It's a complicated one, starting with the fact that most of us only think of these icons as colorful tropes in the first place. In the novel, Gaiman gives his gods unexpected appearances and accoutrements. The protagonist, Shadow, only gradually figures out that a random drunk is actually a leprechaun and his rather ordinary-looking employer, Mr. Wednesday, is the god Odin.

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But description is one thing; drawing, another. How do you draw a leprechaun's rainbow to look anything other than cheesy? Or give Odin gravitas without surrounding him with stereotypical Viking gear? It's a particularly tall order for a cartoonist, who's not just painting frozen portraits of these millennia-old figures, but trying to bring them to life. In both My Ainsel and its predecessor, Shadows , it's easy to see the difficulties encountered by the impressive roster of artists. Even the great P. Craig Russell, who did the script and layouts, gets a bit cute in a story in the first volume. Glenn Fabry and Adam Brown, who drew the chapters' title pages, and David Mack, who contributed additional "chapter design pages," sacrifice life and movement to create an "arty" aura. Their work is rich and compelling, but static.

Oh, and there's yet another challenge facing the artists of My Ainsel : Unlike in the first volume in the series, when Shadow accompanied Mr. Wednesday around the country to recruit gods for an approaching war, he spends a lot of this book hanging out in the suspiciously placid, snowbound town of Lakeside, Wisc. Here, besides having horrific nightmares and heading off wherever Wednesday wants him, Shadow gets to know the suspiciously friendly residents. There's Hinzelmann, who gives Shadow a ride home in his antique car, and Chief of Police Chad Mulligan, who helps him outfit himself in winter clothes and introduces him to everyone at Dave's Finest Foods. In the hands of the wrong artist, Lakeside could look a lot like Punxsutawney.

But Hampton's remote, chilly drawings slide past all these hurdles. He uses photos as the basis for his art, and paradoxically, it gives his people an unreal quality. Their bodies are stiff, and their faces all look like some of the details have been rubbed away with an eraser. It's a miserly style that does little to lure the reader in. But that miserliness is perfect for Gaiman's material. There's nothing cute going on here — not a bit. Hampton's gods, demons and tricksters hardly seem fantastical at all, and their war feels as grim as it should.

Amidst the thin atmosphere of Hampton's pages — an atmosphere further enervated by Jennifer T. Lange's icy colors — the interludes penned by other artists seem to blare luridly. They feel like all-too-forceful reminders that this is, after all, a fantasy story. It's a shame that Galen Showman and Lovern Kindzierski's "Coming to America: 1778" should be plunked down in the midst of Hampton's world. The short story is harrowing and masterfully drawn; it deserves to be a book in its own right.

But the world Hampton draws is truly the world of Gaiman's novel: One where the air is choked by modernity, where mystery and wonder almost fade away in a miasma of progress. This series doesn't feel beautiful or even particularly satisfying, but it does feel necessary, inevitable — real.

Etelka Lehoczky has written about books for The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The New York Times. She tweets at @EtelkaL .

clock This article was published more than 22 years ago

AMERICAN GODS By Neil Gaiman M ...

AMERICAN GODS

By Neil Gaiman

Morrow. 465 pp. $26

At least since sailors of late antiquity heard a voice crying "The Great Pan is dead!," writers have wondered about the fate of the gods. Did Zeus and the Roman Pantheon and the children of Odin simply vanish? Did all those folkloric satyrs, imps and kobolds, those leprechauns, nymphs and little people just evaporate, like dew in the sunlight of reason? Or might they, in fact, still be among us, unrecognized, somewhat diminished in power, but nonetheless here?

This is, in large part, the premise of American Gods. Neil Gaiman -- acclaimed for his Sandman graphic novels and for the comic Good Omens (co-authored with Terry Pratchett) -- imagines that all the immigrants who've ever come to America brought their gods along too. But over time the old-world beliefs faded, and the vitalizing sacrifices to the ancient deities were abandoned. Without worshipers, these erstwhile lords of Nature drifted aimlessly around the country. A few, like Thor, committed suicide. Others took up professions vaguely associated with their traditional attributes. So a goddess of love, such as the Middle Eastern Bilquis, turns tricks in Hollywood. Anansi the Spider changes into Mr. Nancy, a courtly old black man with a knack for clever stories. An Arabic ifrit, or jinni, whirls through Manhattan as a cab driver. Ibis and Anubis -- Egyptian gods of the dead -- naturally become morticians. An Irish folk legend, Mad Sweeney, shuffles through the streets as a homeless wino in a dirty T-shirt.

Yet even as some deities grow rickety and neglected, new ones spring into lusty maturity -- our modern gods of the stock market, the media, the Internet, the credit card and shopping mall and cell phone. Every day these gain in strength and ambition. And increasingly the two opposing belief systems clash. Though these strutting new gods may be haughty and powerful, the old ones are clever and desperate. Rather than allow his kind to disappear into oblivion, their leader, Odin, chooses bold action. He will round up his supernatural cronies and rivals; together they will gird themselves for a great final battle against the forces of the modern world. Immortals will perish at this Ragnarok, but the ancient gods just might triumph in the end.

Does all this sound good? It is. Mystery, satire, sex, horror, poetic prose -- American Gods uses all these to keep the reader turning the pages. Its main character is a likable young guy in his mid-thirties named Shadow, a former physical trainer from a small Indiana town. In the novel's opening pages, Shadow has just spent three years in prison and is eager to be released. He can't wait to see his wife, Laura. But then a fellow inmate murmurs "Big storm coming. Keep your head down," and Shadow's whole life is altered. On his way home, he keeps bumping into the bearded, Jack Daniels-drinking Mr. Wednesday, who repeatedly offers him a job. Eventually, Shadow accepts -- quaffing three glasses of mead to seal the contract -- and becomes the driver, confidant and bodyguard to this peripatetic grifter and wheeler-dealer, only gradually learning the truth about his employer's identity.

Naturally, with a name like Shadow our hero is himself more than he realizes. Why, for instance, does he have these strange dreams about a buffalo-headed man? Is it somehow important that he should be so fiercely in love with Laura, or that he has mastered various coin tricks? How does he manage to survive beatings and capture by the enemy? Why do cats like him so? And do the characters on television sitcoms really talk to him? What, finally, is his ultimate purpose in Mr. Wednesday's shadowy plan?

As this apocalyptic novel progresses, Gaiman balances several different narratives: Shadow's "on-the-road" adventures, as he and Wednesday crisscross the country stopping at cheesy roadside attractions -- actually nodes of deep supernatural power -- to recruit various beings for the coming battle; tales of ancient nomads, African slaves and Irish immigrants, who in ages past transported their gods to these shores; and Shadow's peculiar dreams, in which he visits otherworldly realms and undergoes instruction and rebirth. To keep the story from growing too grandiose, Gaiman throws in a fair amount of humor: Though Wednesday travels all over these United States, he stays off the freeways because "he didn't know which side the freeways were on." There are also two major subplots: 1) the death-defying love between Shadow and his lost Laura; and 2) Shadow's interactions with the populace of picture-postcard Lakeside, where he holes up when the Bad Guys are hot on his trail. As any reader of Richard Matheson or Ursula Le Guin knows, a village that seems too idyllic must be paying some hellish price for its perfection.

About two-thirds of the way through American Gods, Shadow tells a young woman that she wouldn't believe the things that had happened to him. Oh yeah! She answers him with a catalogue aria:

"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen -- I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. . . . I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm. . . . I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. . . . I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."

Not everyone cares for fantasy, and some people can't read the genre at all, unless it's labeled magic realism. But if you have enjoyed, say, John Crowley's Little, Big or Stephen King's The Stand or the urbane horror fiction of Jonathan Carroll, not to mention Gaiman's own Sandman or Frank Miller's Ronin, then American Gods arrives just in time for your July or August vacation. There are flaws in the book -- Shadow's big moment feels anti-climactic, the gods of the media could use more definition, and the novel is probably too long -- but on the whole the story accelerates crisply toward its surprise ending. So watch out this summer: Big storm coming. *

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is [email protected]. His online discussion of books takes place each Thursday at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.

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American Gods: Was Season 1 Better Than the Book?

Is Starz's adaptation worthy of praise?

Before American Gods premiered, fans of Neil Gaiman 's novel wondered how much of the series would follow the source material and how much would deviate from the words on the page. After all, co-showrunner Bryan Fuller 's former series, Hannibal , was only a loose adaptation of Thomas Harris' novels, on which that show was based. Now that American Gods has wrapped its first season (it has already been renewed for Season 2), the answer is that the show is a mix of old and new... For better, and sometimes, for worse.

So, let's break it down.

The role of female characters within the narrative:

Pablo Schreiber and Emily Browning, American Gods

The transition from page to screen capitalized on the opportunity to flesh out the world of American Gods beyond Shadow Moon's ( Ricky Whittle ) narrow perspective, elevating various characters and aspects of the story above what appears on the page. The expanded roles for women -- most notably Emily Browning 's Laura Moon -- added real depth to characters who were formerly one-dimensional, despite being integral to the plot. By diving into Laura's backstory in the series' fourth episode and continuing to explore her post-life existence in the present, American Gods gave voice to a woman previously only seen through her husband's eyes. Where she was once vilified for her actions, this version of Laura became a flesh-and-bone, sympathetic heroine worthy of the screentime afforded her.

The women of American Gods are more than just idols to worship

But Laura wasn't the only female character to benefit from an expanded role on screen. The goddess Bilquis ( Yetide Badaki ) -- who was featured in only two short, if memorable scenes, within the novel -- and Laura's former best friend Audrey ( Betty Gilpin ), who was hardly more than a screech in the wind before Fuller and Green fleshed her out, also became sturdier representations of women. Bilquis' story, in particular, highlighted the real life shortcomings of our society, wherein women regularly take a backseat to their male counterparts and are treated as little more than sexual objects to be used for gratification. Through her arc, the series put women in a position of sexual power in a way that's rarely seen on TV.

Verdict: Better in the TV show By putting complex women in the spotlight and committing to telling their stories, American Gods allows women to have a voice and assert their power beyond the limits traditionally assigned to them in pop culture. And when women struggle to be seen and heard and treated as equals outside of fictional television, it cannot be understated just how much this type of representation matters.

The effectiveness of Shadow and Wednesday's story as a spine for the series:

Ricky Whittle and Ian McShane, American Gods

Conversely, the well-defined female characters with distinct personalities tend to steal the spotlight from the series' main protagonists, which threatens to strain the backbone of the series. Laura spent the season attempting to find and reunite with Shadow, pairing her with an unruly leprechaun named Mad Sweeney ( Pablo Schreiber ); and their adventure easily eclipsed that of Shadow and Mr. Wednesday ( Ian McShane ).

American Gods wants you to think differently about religion

It is not the fault of McShane, who has turns gruffness into an art form and can effectively deliver a one-sided conversation with a raven. It is also not the fault of Whittle, who gives a solid performance as Shadow and breathes more humor and life into the man than ever appeared on the page.

The sad truth is, Shadow is not a terribly interesting protagonist, especially at the outset. As the audience surrogate, he's reactionary, a blank canvas made more interesting by the colorful men and women who surround him. In comparison, there's an immediate and palpable energy that exists between the undead but determined Laura and the demanding and foolish Sweeney; and once the two hardheaded personalities collide, a spark ignites and casts the rest of the show's world into, for lack of a better word, shadow.

Verdict: Better in the book The world and character building that occurs onscreen is a necessary modification for a well-rounded TV series, and we will never argue for Laura Moon or Mad Sweeney to take a seat in order to give off the appearance of a stronger arc for Shadow or Wednesday. But the duo's onscreen presence is not as strong as it could be, and so the book takes this round.

The "Coming to America" vignettes as world-building tools:

Omid Abtahi and Mousa Kraish, American Gods

American Gods frequently recreates scenes word for word from the novel in a concentrated effort from Fuller and co-showrunner Michael Green to recreate the unique experience of reading the novel. Many memorable moments, including some of the "Coming to America" vignettes that appear each week and showcase different gods or religions, are recreated with precision and style in a way that welcomes viewers into a world that is as complicated as it is extraordinary.

These scenes -- which are usually placed at the beginning of each episode, though not always -- help not only to introduce viewers to a number of characters who may potentially play a larger role within the ongoing story of American Gods , but also help to shape its world by extending it beyond Shadow and Wednesday, or Laura and Mad Sweeney.

American Gods bosses break down that intense gay sex scene (and all those penises)

In the novel, the "Coming to America" stories are more easily inserted, but it's equally easy to skip them altogether or forget about them as the story of Shadow progresses. This is due to the fact that sometimes the supplemental information offered is never directly spoken of again. That's not the case in the TV show, with previously featured characters like Salim ( Omid Abtahi ) eventually teaming up with Laura and Mad Sweeney as he searches for the Jinn ( Mousa Kraish ) he met in New York during one of these sequences.

Verdict: Better in the TV show Maybe it's the performances, maybe it's the way the sequences are more overtly tied into the overall theme and story of American Gods , but the "Coming to America" stories work better onscreen than on the page.

The New Gods as believable and substantial Big Bads:

Ricky Whittle, Ian McShane and Crispin Glover, American Gods

In order to create narrative tension within the episodic television format, aspects of the novel's timeline have been rearranged and character introductions have been reworked throughout the first season. This makes sense as the world of American Gods must grow outside of Shadow's world view if it wants to sustain itself. It is imperative, for instance, that as the de facto leader of the new gods, Mr. World ( Crispin Glover ) -- who is nothing more than a shadowy voice on the telephone for much of the novel -- must arrive and have a physical presence much earlier in the television adaptation so as to feel like a real antagonist.

Other characters, including Media ( Gillian Anderson ) also appear more frequently than their book counterparts in order to better emphasize the threat of a brewing war between Wednesday and the new gods.

Verdict: Draw Different mediums require different structures, and what works in a novel does not always work for television. To declare that one method of storytelling is superior to another in this instance would be to discount how worlds are built and how information is disseminated based on narrative perspective.

The social commentary component:

Corbin Bernsen, American Gods

American Gods is pretty overtly a political story about immigrants and cultural preservation, but when it was written and published in 2001, just a few months before 9/11, the subject wasn't seen as controversial the way it is interpreted today. The political landscape of the U.S. has changed since 2001, and in the wake of Donald Trump campaigning on anti-immigrant sentiment -- and attempting to invoke a Muslim ban early into his presidency -- the political relevance of American Gods has only grown.

American Gods renewed for Season 2

In addressing the racism still present within American society -- and being fed by propaganda -- the African trickster god Anansi ( Orlando Jones ) opens the the show's second episode with a powerful monologue that forces viewers to confront just how little progress has been made in America's relatively short history. "You arrive in America, land of opportunity, milk and honey, and guess what -- you all get to be slaves, split up, sold off and worked to death," he tells a ship full of Africans bound for the New World. "A hundred years after you get free, you're still getting ... shot at by police." Anansi is unflinching in his critique, and the knowledge that he's a storyteller who manipulates people makes the truth of the situation -- for we have witnessed the events of the past -- all the more unsettling.

In order to not just update the novel's story to reflect the current climate but add to it, Fuller and Green also created a character who was not in the novel: Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, blacksmithing and the forge. The addition of Vulcan ( Corbin Bernsen ) speaks specifically to the deeply unsettling era we currently live in. An old god, Vulcan has founded a town and a bullet factory that allows him to retain his power -- the fire of old has been replaced with literal firepower. The depiction of a small Southern town run by Vulcan, populated entirely by caucasian men and women, and littered with fascist imagery speaks to the ongoing issues of modern American society.

But the series also expanded upon the themes present in the novel during adaptation. The story is built upon the idea of worship and the power derived from it, and so this opens up a dialogue about religion and what it is we think we worship in an era where, culturally, this topic has fallen out of fashion or been diluted. In the season finale, we meet a number of different Jesuses, who have co-opted Easter's ( Kristin Chenoweth ) day even as she attempts to lean into the commercialization of the holiday to remain relevant. Meanwhile, ostensible villains Media and Technical Boy are a nuisance for Wednesday, but they are powerfully present in American society, and speak to changing habits.

Verdict: Better in the TV show Though it is a little more difficult to compare the novel's social commentary to that of the TV show when our current political climate is much more volatile, the truth is the series does a much better job of shining a spotlight on America's current state than the novel did in 2001 (though to be fair, Gaiman may have been going for mythical resonance than modern resonance).

Final Score: The TV show Although our incredibly scientific study gives the edge to the TV series, it's important to point out there are limits to the novel that are largely eliminated by a jump to TV, including expanding a limited point of view and fleshing out an entire cast of characters. The series' ability to dig into relevant social issues is also somewhat difficult to measure against a novel that was written prior to 9/11, a crucial turning point for issues of immigration/Americans' own view of America.

However, the series' first season was not without its struggles. Wildly inconsistent, as characters were introduced and storylines took prominence or were moved to the back burner, the eight-episode first season was a bit of a messy debut for American Gods . Building a world as complex and bizarre as the one Gaiman first created in the pages of his beloved novel is a difficult task, and one that takes time. But now that some of the initial groundwork is out of the way -- and now that Shadow knows what exactly he has agreed to -- maybe the second season will feel more stable as we dig into the real meat of the story.

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American Gods Is a Bizarre, Dazzling Show

American Gods is one of the strangest series ever to air on American television. I say that with the authority of a critic who put Hannibal , the last series from American Gods co-producer Bryan Fuller, in the number-one spot on his top-ten list two years running . Hannibal was an aggressively strange show: bloody, perverse, and intellectually playful, and more interested in dreamlike atmosphere and imagery than in traditional storytelling. The influence of three Davids — Lynch, Fincher, and Cronenberg — was always apparent, and there were times, especially in season three, when Hannibal got as close to abstraction as a series with a plot and characters could get. As a piece of storytelling, American Gods makes Hannibal look like The Andy Griffith Show .

The pilot starts with a prologue about a band of Norse explorers making landfall in the Americas and suffering horribly, turning, in desperation, to supernatural forces that seem to ignore them. The first four episodes all have prologues like this: little self-contained stories about the relationship between humans and gods, or prayers and actions, that are thematically adjacent to the main show but exactly a part of it. They’re parables attached to a show which itself has the feel of a parable.

The main series takes its sweet time introducing its main character, Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle of The 100 ), a man who gets released from prison at the same time that he learns his wife Laura (Emily Browning) has died in a car wreck. In time, Shadow Moon will fall into the orbit of Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane), a rascally con man who waxes philosophical about everything under the sun (a perfect role for McShane).

The show then becomes a picaresque narrative, and at times a straight-up road movie, with Mr. Wednesday and Shadow Moon crisscrossing the United States in a big, old American car, contacting various supernatural figures and having conversations with them. These include a trio of sisters with supernatural powers, separated by decades of age and led by Zorya Vechernyaya (90-year-old Cloris Leachman); Czernobog (Peter Stormare), Zorya’s roommate, a chain-smoking slaughterhouse worker who’s nostalgic for the days when he used to kill livestock with a sledgehammer; Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber), a belligerent Irishman who challenges Shadow Moon to a fistfight; and a seductive woman ( Hannibal alum Gillian Anderson) who appears to Shadow from a bank of TVs in a superstore in black and white, in the guise of Lucille Ball.

I’m not sure how much else I want to tell you about the plot — and not because surprise is essential to American Gods. This series, which is adapted by Fuller and Michael Green (co-screenwriter of Logan ) from Neil Gaiman’s popular novel , will probably have a Game of Thrones– type viewership, mixing newbies with a large percentage of viewers who know everything that’s going to happen already and are just watching to see how the show will dramatize things.

More to the point, this does not strike me as a series that cares very much about the “whoa!” factor. I haven’t read Gaiman’s book and studiously avoided descriptions of it, because I wanted to come to the show with virgin eyes and ears. As a result, I didn’t experience any of the revelations, which feel incidental and sly, as anything other than accessories to the show’s unique aesthetic, which is all about what’s happening in the moment. Fuller and Green and their directors — Hannibal veteran David Slade, in particular — structure every episode so that it feels like a bunch of loosely connected short stories with recurring characters. Some have preexisting relationships with each other (like Mr. Wednesday and Mad Sweeney), while others just seem to mysteriously appear in the story, like cameo players. The most striking of the latter is Orlando Jones’s dandyish Mr. Nancy, who’s at the center of the second episode’s prologue, speaking to slaves shackled in the belly of a ship in the 17th century. (Skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to know what’s really going on.)

We soon learn that we’re witnessing the first stirrings of a war between the old gods — including Odin, Mr. Wednesday’s real identity, and Jesus, who shows up in a later episode in the guise of Jeremy Davies — and the new gods of technology, industry, and commerce. (Anderson’s character, Media, is one of the new gods.) Mr. Wednesday’s goal is to get the old gang back together to battle the new gods for control of the universe and reassert their supremacy. The premise of the novel is that gods actually do exist , but only because people believe in them; because belief in the old gods is on the wane — human thoughts being preoccupied by technology and electronic images — the old gods themselves are also on the wane.

Despite the momentous stakes, none of the characters on American Gods seem particularly obsessed with the fate of humankind and the universe, and the show doesn’t seem obsessed with it, either. It treats the premise as an excuse to serve up eccentric characters engaged in conversation or delivering very long, Tarantino-esque monologues. (Czernobog’s description of the old days at the slaughterhouse is a horrendous standout.) Every now and then, you get a burst of action that would seem unspeakably brutal if the show didn’t abstract the blood and gore to the point where you feel like you’re looking at a self-aware gallery exhibition. There’s a moment in a fourth-episode fight where a supernaturally powerful combatant kicks a man in the crotch and splits him in half vertically, so that his skull and spine fly up into the air; the image is so ridiculous that I laughed at it, and I’m fairly sure I was supposed to.

There are also a number of extended sex scenes, one involving a genie and a salesman, that are much more emotionally intense than anything in Starz’s Spartacus franchise. The show’s aesthetic puts you in the moment — in the middle of the action, as it were — rather than giving you a safe distance by dicing the encounter into a montage of gorgeously toned bodies. When it comes to nudity, Fuller is an equal-opportunity showman: Yetide Badaki’s sex goddess Bilquis goes full-frontal with a variety of partners (including Joel Murray, a.k.a. Mad Men ’s Freddy Rumsen, of all people), but the show is much more of a showcase for the male physique. In fact, it might be the first commercial drama to feature a penis (often erect) in every episode. Why that isn’t a pledge to viewers in ads is beyond me.

Given Fuller’s increasingly voluptuous and polymorphous sense of spectacle over the years, this seems all of a piece. There were scenes in Hannibal ’s second and third seasons that made blood, food, and unclothed bodies seem like alternating courses in the same never-ending feast. The close-ups of Hannibal Lecter’s culinary creations, his handwork as a killer, and his rivals’ gruesome gallery installations built of human bodies were all lit and shot in ways that stylized them and made them seem like parts of the same continuum. That’s the case here, too. Close-ups of poker chips, quarters, gold coins, blood, severed limbs, goulash, hardboiled eggs, dandelion stems, and rain-soaked earth are gorgeous on their own terms, but they feel like propositions as well as images — attempts to articulate a worldview that cannot be fully explained with words.

There’s also the possibility that Fuller, Green, and company don’t have anything to say, but are having a great time saying it anyway. Just as humans have to take a leap of faith to believe in the unseen and unverifiable, so, too, do viewers of American Gods have to decide to believe that the show is leading somewhere that will justify the time spent watching it and wondering what in the ever-loving hell is going on. There are points when the whole series seems to take its cues from Mr. Wednesday, who tells Shadow, “You can’t weave the stories that are necessary for belief unless you have a personality.” Mr. Wednesday is a god, but he is also a con man.

After watching the first four episodes, I can say that I don’t love American Gods the way I loved Hannibal . This is partly because Hannibal , for all its cool bloodletting and prankish humor, was a much warmer series — no doubt because of the physically unconsummated love between Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal and Hugh Dancy’s Will Graham. The relationship between those two characters and the individual cases they investigated served as through lines connecting all the blowout scenes of horror, violence, and seduction. American Gods is deliberately disjointed, like tracks on an album. There are times when the show seems more interested in parsing ephemeral moments in the here-and-now than contemplating the big issues. The more beguiling moments involve bits of what might be called barroom philosophy, such as Shadow Moon saying that “all the best drinks have self-defining names,” or Media lamenting people’s increasing inability to concentrate on one thing at a time. “They hold a smaller screen in their laps or in the palm of their hands so they don’t get bored watching the big one,” she says. Watch American Gods on a big screen, if possible, and turn the small ones off.

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American Gods: A Novel Paperback – March 28, 2017

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Now a STARZ® Original Series produced by FremantleMedia North America starring Ricky Whittle, Ian McShane, Emily Browning, and Pablo Schreiber.

Locked behind bars for three years, Shadow did his time, quietly waiting for the day when he could return to Eagle Point, Indiana. A man no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, all he wanted was to be with Laura, the wife he deeply loved, and start a new life.

But just days before his release, Laura and Shadow’s best friend are killed in an accident. With his life in pieces and nothing to keep him tethered, Shadow accepts a job from a beguiling stranger he meets on the way home, an enigmatic man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. A trickster and a rogue, Wednesday seems to know more about Shadow than Shadow does himself.

Life as Wednesday’s bodyguard, driver, and errand boy is far more interesting and dangerous than Shadow ever imagined. Soon Shadow learns that the past never dies . . . and that beneath the placid surface of everyday life a storm is brewing—an epic war for the very soul of America—and that he is standing squarely in its path.

“Mystery, satire, sex, horror, poetic prose— American Gods uses all these to keep the reader turning the pages.” — Washington Post

Book 1 of 2 American Gods
Print length 576 pages
Language English
Publisher William Morrow Paperbacks
Publication date March 28, 2017
Dimensions 5.31 x 0.92 x 8 inches
ISBN-10 0062572237
ISBN-13 978-0062572233
Lexile measure 840L
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“ American Gods manages to reinvent, and reassert, the enduring importance of fantastic literature itself in this late age of the world. Dark fun, and nourishing to the soul.” — Michael Chabon

“Provocative yet fun . . . Gaiman has applied his vast breadth of knowledge about all things mythological to a truly high concept.” — Entertainment Weekly

“Gaiman returns to the fertile killing ground that nourished The Sandma n : that peculiarly American crossroads where pop culture intersects with religion, violence and death.” — Village Voice Literary Supplement

“Immensely rewarding . . . . Suffused with . . . powerful imagery and deftly painted characters . . . . A finely crafted novel of weight and significance [with] poetic descriptions, sharp-eyed criticism, and first-rate storytelling. There is much to enjoy, to admire, and to ponder in this unforgettable tale.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Pointed, occasionally comic, often scary, consistently moving and provocative . . . . American Gods is strewn with secrets and magical visions.” — USA Today

“Mystery, satire, sex, horror, poetic prose-American Gods uses all these to keep the reader turning the pages.” — Washington Post

“Original, engrossing, and endlessly inventive.” — George R. R. Martin

American Gods is sexy, thrilling, dark, funny and poetic." — Teller, of Penn & Teller

"American Gods is like a fast run downhill through a maze -- both exhilarating and twisted." — Jane Lindskold, author of Changer and

From the Back Cover

Now a STARZ ® Original Series produced by FremantleMedia North America starring Ricky Whittle, Ian McShane, Emily Browning, and Pablo Schreiber

About the Author

Neil Gaiman is the New York Times bestselling and multi-award winning author and creator of many beloved books, graphic novels, short stories, film, television and theatre for all ages. He is the recipient of the Newbery and Carnegie Medals, and many Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Will Eisner Awards. Neil has adapted many of his works to television series, including Good Omens (co-written with Terry Pratchett) and The Sandman . He is a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR and Professor in the Arts at Bard College. For a lot more about his work, please visit: https://www.neilgaiman.com/

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Morrow Paperbacks; Anniversary edition (March 28, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 576 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062572237
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062572233
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 840L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.92 x 8 inches
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Neil Gaiman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books, including Norse Mythology, Neverwhere, and The Graveyard Book. Among his numerous literary awards are the Newbery and Carnegie medals, and the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Will Eisner awards. He is a Professor in the Arts at Bard College.

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‘American Gods’ Is A Holy Feast For The Senses

“This is the only country in the world that wonders what it is,” Mr. Wednesday suggests early in Starz’s new fantasy drama American Gods .

Wednesday (Ian McShane) would know. Like most of the characters in the show — adapted by Bryan Fuller and Michael Green from the beloved Neil Gaiman novel(*), it debuts Sunday at 9pm ET (I’ve seen the first four episodes) — he is a god whose pantheon has long since fallen out of fashion, but who at one time in the distant past was known and worshipped by every man, woman, and child of a particular region of this planet, where there was a unity of faith, culture, and identity. Now, though, these Norse and Slavic and West African and Irish gods and otherwise magical creatures have long since lost their followers, who have moved on to new ideas and new gods, and so they live on the fringes of America: a nation of immigrants, who have brought bits and pieces of the gods’ old cultures here and tossed them into the great American melting pot. Those tiny scraps of belief are just enough to keep the gods up and moving, even though their circumstances are far shabbier than in the days when they had entire nations praying to them. Wednesday is an itinerant con man, leprechaun Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber) an angry barfly, Egyptian death god Anubis (Chris Obi) now works as a mortician, while a Jinn (Mousa Kraish) drives a cab in New York, occasionally granting a passenger’s wish.

(*) I read (and liked) the book when it was first published back in 2001, but found when watching the show that I remembered almost nothing about it, save the true identities of a few characters. This turned out to be useful, as I got to be continually surprised by plot developments in what is, per critic friends who’ve read the book more recently, a pretty faithful translation.

Our guide to this strange new world is a thief called Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle), just out of prison and eager to get home to his wife Laura (Emily Browning), but distracted by tragedy and a job offer from Wednesday, who seems to know far more about Shadow than Shadow does about himself. Wednesday’s amassing an army of old gods to do battle against some new ones who represent the aspects of modern life that we worship at the altars of — Gillian Anderson, for instance, pops up as Media, who channels iconic pop cultural figures (a fabulous showcase for Anderson, in the midst of a great second act to her career) — even as he tries to teach his young assistant the tricks of the godly trade during their road trip across these United States.

Though Wednesday is the show’s most overt flimflam artist, there’s a sense that many of its deities have become — and maybe always were — hustlers of a high order. As Wednesday puts it when explaining a particular scam to Shadow, “It’s all about getting them to believe in you.” And we see throughout the series the way certain old gods — say, the love deity Bilquis (Yetide Badaki), who literally absorbs her sexual partners — have to trick people into giving themselves over, body, mind, and, especially, soul. These issues of belief, of national vs. religious identities, of the way culture is passed down and spread out in unexpected ways — Laura is a blackjack dealer at an Ancient Egyptian-themed casino that uses Anubis and the rest of his pantheon as exotic scenery — are at the core of the story Fuller and Green (and Gaiman before them) are telling. At times, it’s a deep and powerful saga — the second episode opens with African spider god Mr. Nancy (Orlando Jones, breathing rhetorical fire) in the hold of a slave ship telling the captives a tale of warning: “Once upon a time, a man got fucked… That’s the story of black people in America!” — while at many others, it’s more of an exercise in style over substance.

But what style! Fuller and his collaborators — including a bunch of Hannibal directors like David Slade (behind the camera for the first three episodes) and Vincenzo Natali — make every frame of American Gods look museum-quality. The blood and sex on this show are abundant in roughly equal measure — there’s a gay sex scene in the third episode that’s as elaborate as any TV has ever seen, only involving flame, dust, and magic — but presented in a baroque style befitting the scale of the show’s characters. These are gods fighting, and seducing, and these acts can’t be presented as mundane in any way. The whole thing is jaw-dropping to look at, as visually audacious as anything Fuller, Slade, and company did on Hannibal , but without that pesky serial killing. (Though many, many, many bodies drop, starting with a prologue set in Viking times.)

And that cast is something else. As Wednesday, McShane (who starred in Green’s fascinating, short-lived NBC modern Biblical drama Kings ) is going full Swearengen: charming and guarded and always three moves ahead of everyone else, albeit less prone to violence given some of the muscle he has on hand. But nearly every actor who comes in — Peter Stormare and Cloris Leachman as a pair of Slavic deities now living in Chicago squalor, Jonathan Tucker as a prison buddy of Shadow’s, Betty Gilpin as a very human friend of Laura’s struggling to make sense of this godly madness — is very clearly having a blast, and the joy and magnificence of their performances are infectious. (Several of the show’s more interesting casting choices — Crispin Glover, Kristin Chenoweth, Jeremy Davies, and Corbin Bernsen, among others — either don’t appear at all in these early episodes, or appear briefly, as the narrative’s a slow build. But I imagine Fuller and Green will give them fun things to play.)

As the man at the center of the storm, Whittle is something of a mixed bag. Shadow is a reserved character by design, and Whittle does well as straight man to McShane, Schreiber, Anderson, and others, but there are times when his cool bearing does him a disservice opposite these much bigger and more charismatic performances. He’s pretty good in a show where almost everyone else is great. Browning’s much more interesting at playing a seemingly normal person who becomes a plaything of the gods, and one of the show’s best episodes is a Laura spotlight revealing how she and Shadow fell in love, and what she was up to during his prison stretch.

American Gods aspires to explore both halves of its title, and many episodes open with a flashback to how one old deity or another found their way onto our shores, to in time become part of this grand and unusual national experiment. Like the humans who once worshipped them, some arrived here with great hope, others because it was the only option remaining. Based on what we see of Mr. Wednesday and the others, the best they’ve been able to manage is simple survival, but the series captures the grandeur of who and what they once were, and can occasionally still be if they can find enough suckers to believe in them again. It’s a blast.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at [email protected]

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American Gods: A Novel Paperback – Illustrated, March 16 2021

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From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, a contemporary masterpiece combing mythology, adventure, and illusion―one of ten classic Gaiman works repackaged with elegant original watercolor art by acclaimed artist Henry Sene Yee

Released from prison, Shadow finds his world turned upside down. His wife has been killed; a stranger offers him a job and Shadow, with nothing to lose, accepts. But a storm is coming. Beneath the placid surface of everyday life, a war is being fought – and the prize is the very soul of America.

An inspired combination of mythology, adventure, and illusion, American Gods is a dark and kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth and across an America at once eerily familiar and utterly alien. It is, quite simply, a contemporary masterpiece.

“Piercingly observed, jaggedly poetic, ruthlessly cutting a path through graveyards of dead stars and dead money and dead feelings, this novel is the map back to dawn.” — Steve Erickson

“ American Gods manages to reinvent, and reassert, the enduring importance of fantastic literature itself in this late age of the world. Dark fun, and nourishing to the soul.” — Michael Chabon

Print length 560 pages
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“ American Gods manages to reinvent, and reassert, the enduring importance of fantastic literature itself in this late age of the world. Dark fun, and nourishing to the soul.” — Michael Chabon

“Provocative yet fun . . . Gaiman has applied his vast breadth of knowledge about all things mythological to a truly high concept.” — Entertainment Weekly

“Pointed, occasionally comic, often scary, consistently moving and provocative . . . . American Gods is strewn with secrets and magical visions.” — USA Today

“Mystery, satire, sex, horror, poetic prose-American Gods uses all these to keep the reader turning the pages.” — Washington Post

“Original, engrossing, and endlessly inventive.” — George R. R. Martin

American Gods is sexy, thrilling, dark, funny and poetic." — Teller, of Penn & Teller

"American Gods is like a fast run downhill through a maze -- both exhilarating and twisted." — Jane Lindskold, author of Changer and

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“Piercingly observed, jaggedly poetic, ruthlessly cutting a path through graveyards of dead stars and dead money and dead feelings, this novel is the map back to dawn.” — Steve Erickson

“ American Gods manages to reinvent, and reassert, the enduring importance of fantastic literature itself in this late age of the world. Dark fun, and nourishing to the soul.” — Michael Chabon

Print length 560 pages
Language English
Publisher William Morrow Paperbacks
Publication date 16 March 2021
Dimensions 13.49 x 3.2 x 20.32 cm
ISBN-10 0063081911
ISBN-13 978-0063081918
See all details

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“ American Gods manages to reinvent, and reassert, the enduring importance of fantastic literature itself in this late age of the world. Dark fun, and nourishing to the soul.” — Michael Chabon

“Provocative yet fun . . . Gaiman has applied his vast breadth of knowledge about all things mythological to a truly high concept.” — Entertainment Weekly

“Pointed, occasionally comic, often scary, consistently moving and provocative . . . . American Gods is strewn with secrets and magical visions.” — USA Today

“Mystery, satire, sex, horror, poetic prose-American Gods uses all these to keep the reader turning the pages.” — Washington Post

“Original, engrossing, and endlessly inventive.” — George R. R. Martin

American Gods is sexy, thrilling, dark, funny and poetic." — Teller, of Penn & Teller

"American Gods is like a fast run downhill through a maze -- both exhilarating and twisted." — Jane Lindskold, author of Changer and

About the Author

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Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Morrow Paperbacks; Reissue edition (16 March 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 560 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0063081911
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0063081918
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 408 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.49 x 3.2 x 20.32 cm
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American gods: a novel.

By Neil Gaiman

"Piercingly observed, jaggedly poetic, ruthlessly cutting a path through graveyards of dead stars and dead money and dead feelings, this novel is the map back to dawn." -- Steve Erickson

" American Gods manages to reinvent, and reassert, the enduring importance of fantastic literature itself in this late age of the world. Dark fun, and nourishing to the soul." -- Michael Chabon

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Domination Meets Inspiration in a Consuming Affair Between Artists

R.O. Kwon’s second novel, “Exhibit,” sees two Korean American women finding pleasure in a bond that knits creative expression and sadomasochism.

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By Alexandra Jacobs

EXHIBIT, by R.O. Kwon

“Everything was beautiful at the ballet,” goes the famous song from “A Chorus Line,” but of course backstage there are blisters, anorexia and worse, like the feathers popping out of Natalie Portman’s back in “Black Swan.”

Hypnotic and sometimes perplexing, R.O. Kwon’s second novel, “Exhibit,” literalizes the twinning of pain and art with a ballerina character who is an actual sadomasochist.

Kwon’s protagonist, Jin, is a photographer who becomes interested in portraiture after drifting away from God. “People, not relics, I thought, at which point the images began rioting to life.” At a party thrown by a guy named Irving in the rarefied quarter of Marin County, Calif., she encounters the ballerina, Lidija: a principal, known for her floating jump, who bypassed the slog of the corps. She’s tattooed and unfazed by an injured leg.

“It was a lifelong allure, the gloss of a bold, strong girl,” Jin thinks.

Inconveniently, she has come to the party with her husband, Philip, a film producer, whom she met at a college called Edwards that readers of Kwon’s widely heralded and more plot-packed first novel, “ The Incendiaries ,” will recognize. Indeed one of Jin’s photography projects — in a sort of “Black Swan”-like authorial doubling — is to reimagine an alternate ending for that book’s protagonist, Phoebe, who rather than rejecting religion was sucked into a cult. Jin swaps out pictures of Phoebe for historical images before showing her piece publicly so as not to offend one of their mutual acquaintances.

Part of Lidija’s appeal is that she argues for aesthetic integrity over tact or propriety. Their sex, described discreetly, is a kind of performance art. The two women rendezvous in Irving’s turret, both menstruating. The ballerina smears blood on her own hip as Jin, an old burn wounded and then soothed, snaps away. “You’re like a wild thing at a kill,” Lidija tells her. “Stained in triumph.”

’Tis the season for outré novels of marital malcontent among the creative class. But all three in this triangle have had to compromise in order to get along in mainstream America.

Lidija, who like Jin is Korean, changed her name from Iseul (Kwon supplies the Korean lettering for this and other words) at age 5 to sound more Slavic. Philip, though he would “pass as being white,” as Lidija points out, was born Felipe in Spain. And Jin has suppressed longing to be hurt sexually, knowing it conforms to a stereotype of Asian women as “pliant, subject. Ill-used and glad of it.”

Philip, moreover, is not a fan of kink, the theme of a short-fiction anthology Kwon co-edited in 2021. As another song goes — he’s vanilla, baby. And speaking of babies, though the couple agreed from the outset of their relationship not to have children, he’s changed his mind. “It’s the scent,” he says with bafflement, sniffing a friend’s infant’s head.

The trio argues about gradations of racism, and the boundaries of art. (“If I’m hollering, it isn’t ballet,” Lidija insists. “It might be art. But it’s just not ballet.”) We’re asked to envision a lot of avant-garde creations; tons of triptychs and tableaus. Philip describes a movie of a dancer yelpingly en pointe on the lid of a piano with knives strapped to her feet, as the original Little Mermaid felt.

Jin once imagined that she was born “as a partial fish,” Lidija compares her own flaking sunburned skin to fish scales, and they discuss fish folk tales. I’m not sure entirely what to make of this, except that fish are beautiful, fragile creatures with significance in religion.

Complicating matters further is the ghost of a kisaeng, a Korean courtesan, who supposedly died alongside a firstborn son far back in Jin’s lineage, when she was not allowed to marry. According to family lore, this spirit has the power to destroy relationships. Between chapters she tells Jin what really happened to her, in little spritzes of sarcasm and profanity. “Oh, it’s like a dragon’s tail, oh, how will I fit it in?” she mocks the rich old men who took her to bed.

“Exhibit” is quite short: barely over 200 pages, and sometimes I did wish the kisaeng, full of vim though she is, would haunt another novel so I could get back to what was going on with Jin and Lidija and Philip and Irv.

An English-speaking reader doesn’t need a Korean dictionary beside the book, though she might occasionally need an English one. A polemic accusing Jin of blasphemy is not thrown in the trash but “shied.” After being hit with a riding crop and forced to eat olives and currants off a floor — “Exhibit” is a feast of various food and drink — Jin feels her flesh “floresced.” Kwon stretches and pauses the language to its outer limits, as if in a series of tendus and arabesques.

Chunks of her prose could also be torn out and put in a poetry book, no problem. On fame: “I knew it to be pyrite dross, a tinsel jinx.” Nude swimmers are “blue nereids, plume-tailed.” As much as commas, Kwon favors semicolons, which Kurt Vonnegut infamously called “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing”; if so, her novel is not just an exploration of BDSM in contemporary relationships, but a transvestite hermaphrodite convention, to which one is both privileged and perhaps slightly puzzled to receive an all-access pass.

“Exhibit” is a highly sensory experience, awash in petals and colors, smells and flavors, that adds to the literature on a proclivity much discussed and often misunderstood. It lingers like a mysterious, multihued bruise.

EXHIBIT | By R.O. Kwon | Riverhead | 224 pp. | $28

Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs

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The Wild Blood Dynasty

What a little-known family reveals about the nation’s untamed spirit

illustration with archival photos of woman in 19th-century dress, a group of men in hats standing around a cannon, the kitchen of an old house, and an illustration of an eye connected by red lines

A merican Bloods —what a title! Hammering out agreement on the meaning of American is hard enough, but factor in blood —our precious bodily fluid, susceptible to poisoning in the fevered fascist imagination—and a brawl might just be brewing. If you’ve figured out that Blood is a surname, the subtitle of John Kaag’s new book ( The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation ) could possibly defuse the situation, but it too is provocative: If the Blood dynasty shaped the nation, why have we never heard of it?

Explore the June 2024 Issue

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Kaag, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, lives in a house on the banks of the Concord River that was built in 1745 by a colonial named Josiah Blood. A decade later, in that same house, Thaddeus Blood was born. He was at the scene with a musket on April 19, 1775, when the “shot heard round the world” was fired; as an old man, he was interviewed about the experience by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Kaag saw that the Blood clan would offer him a chance to explore big ideas in relation to individual lives, to start close to home and expand outward, weaving together personalities, cultural history, and philosophy in an attempt to ask not just where we came from but where we’re going.

He has made a habit of combining philosophy with first-person narratives of a confessional cast. In American Philosophy: A Love Story (2016), he tells us about his first two marriages while communing with his “intellectual heroes,” the New England thinkers Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James. In Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (2018), he treks up and down an alp or two with the German iconoclast . The new project is much more ambitious. Working with a bigger cast on an expansive stage, he’s hoping to unlock secrets of Americanness. No wonder the strain shows.

Kaag sets out to trace the nation’s growth (and “excruciating growing pains”) as refracted through “one of America’s first and most expansive pioneer families,” whose lineage happens to run straight through his family home. Listed in the index of a privately published genealogy he finds in his house are thousands of Bloods, from Aaron to Zebulon. In addition to Josiah and Thaddeus, Kaag plucks out a handful of others, curious characters born between 1618 and 1838, who found themselves in the thick of roiling history or crossed paths with famous American thinkers.

From the April 2023 issue: Adam Begley on why you should be reading Sebastian Barry

Kaag makes the case that, “unlike many other more visible or iconic American dynasties” (he mentions the Cabots, Lowells, Astors, Roosevelts), the Bloods

consistently, and with remarkable regularity, reveal a particular frontier ethos: their genealogy tracks what Henry David Thoreau called “wildness,” an original untamed spirit that would recede in the making of America but never be extinguished entirely. The United States may have been founded on “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but it was always shot through with something unbalanced, heedless, undomesticated, fearful.

The making of America meant pushing back the frontier, establishing civilization where before, as the Puritan William Bradford testified , there had been “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts & wild men.” Kaag asserts that New England colonials drew a clear, unwavering line between the civilized and the wild, but he believes that the Blood dynasty shared a more complicated ethos: Its members “continually explored life and its extremes,” absorbing the lesson that “human existence was not cleanly demarcated but unshakably wild.”

Hardly alone in wanting, just now, to weigh the risk of mayhem in America, he asks, “What untamed stories lie beneath the skin of our more or less well-functioning society? How persistent is the wildness that once defined our country?” The answers, he warns, won’t be tidy, though he can’t resist assigning conveniently emblematic roles to his small sample of Zelig-like Bloods.

Naked opportunism guided the first figure in Kaag’s book: Thomas Blood, who was not American but is the most notorious individual to bear the name. In 1671, he tried to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. A rogue as well as a thief, Thomas sets the tone for the American branch of the family, which was started by his nephews, who were among the early New England settlers, arriving sometime in the 1630s. By mid-century, Robert Blood had established a farm on a 3,000-acre tract just north of Concord, then very much the frayed edge of civilization. A “troublesome” man, Robert was a good citizen when it suited him and a renegade when taxes fell due. He nonetheless understood that the best defense against external threats was neighborly cooperation. The wary dance he did with local authority, in Kaag’s telling, “presages in miniature the political dynamics” as the colonies began to rebel against the British Crown.

The old favorites Emerson and Thoreau, Transcendentalists who championed American cultural independence and the primacy of the individual soul, take the stage as Kaag fast-forwards roughly a century to focus on Bloods intersecting with homegrown ferment. Robert’s great-great-grandson Thaddeus made an enduring impression on Emerson, who admired the rare courage that the veteran of the skirmish at the Old North Bridge had displayed as a young minuteman. Kaag suggests (though certainly doesn’t prove) that Emerson’s conversation with Thaddeus in 1835 was the catalyst for what he calls Emerson’s own “acts of insurrection”: two speeches delivered in the next several years, “ The American Scholar ” and the bombshell “ Divinity School Address ,” in which he renounced all organized religion (and in particular what he elsewhere derided as “corpse-cold Unitarianism”).

“The American Scholar” called for a new type of educated American , an active, engaged intellectual boldly embracing the rough-and-tumble of a new nation—what a pleasure to see the 34-year-old Emerson roll up his sleeves and resolve to “run eagerly into this resounding tumult,” to take his place “in the ring to suffer and to work”! And yet Kaag’s next Blood, Perez, son of Thaddeus, shrank from the tumult. A recluse and an amateur astronomer, Perez spent his time in his woodshed, seated on a swivel chair, peering at the heavens through a telescope. Undeterred, Kaag finds a way to fit him into his exploration of wildness by claiming that Perez had a “lasting and profound” friendship with Thoreau and helped him “define his conception of human freedom.” In the first sentence of “Walking” ( an essay published in this magazine, posthumously, in 1862 ), Thoreau associates wildness with “absolute freedom”—as distinct from “a freedom and culture merely civil.” According to Kaag, both Perez and Thoreau freed themselves from “the tawdry distractions of modern life,” and the eccentric old stargazer inspired Thoreau “to see the inner, noble form of a seemingly common man.”

From the June 1862 issue: Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking”

The resounding tumult returns with James Clinton Blood, a co-founder and the first mayor of Lawrence, Kansas, and a passing acquaintance of John Brown, whose gory attacks on militant pro-slavery settlers helped give “Bloody Kansas” its name . James had gone west as part of an abolitionist scheme to keep the territory from becoming a slave state, and acted as an agent and a scout, buying up land from Native tribes. He survived the Lawrence Massacre of 1863 (when Confederate guerrillas killed some 150 unarmed men and boys), and in the postwar decades “happily watched the frontier town civilize itself.”

James is meant to be representative of the many Bloods who participated in the settlement of the American West and who “came to understand the border as a paradoxical space, where the most vicious of beings could also be the most vulnerable.” I don’t know whom Kaag is referring to in that last clause or what he means. He’s keenly aware that we can’t contemplate “the bleeding of Kansas” unless we reckon with the calamitous war fought over the moral abomination of slavery and also the genocidal persecution of the Native population. In earlier chapters, he mentions a few of the enslaved people bought and sold by various 18th-century Bloods, and here he describes the dismal fate of the Plains tribes who were cheated out of their land or driven off or simply exterminated. We never learn, though, whether James’s land deals were made in good faith or how other untamed Bloods fared on the new frontier. This seems the wrong moment to fudge: The stories we tell about how, exactly, the Wild West civilized itself color our ideas about who we are as a nation.

A merican Bloods is not a panoramic intellectual history or even a conjoined narrative. Nor does Kaag substantiate the claim that the Bloods “circulated through each era, an animating force of American history, just below the surface.” Don’t let the fancy blood metaphor distract you: Heredity cannot plausibly account for the persistence of an ideology or a spirit over a span of centuries. Instead of telling an unbroken story, Kaag has assembled a series of portraits, some more engaging than others, the degree of interest determined by which great men are adjacent to the male Blood in question. At one point, he alludes to what he calls “a largely forgotten counternarrative: the Blood women.” But his only substantive contribution to that counternarrative is to present us with the charismatic women’s-rights advocate Victoria Woodhull, who married Colonel James Harvey Blood, a veteran of the Union Army and a committed spiritualist. Kaag calls Woodhull “arguably the most famous and scandalous of the American Bloods,” and it’s perfectly obvious why he would want to adopt her: Extreme and mercurial, she’s an ideal embodiment of many divergent, unconventional responses to the trauma of the Civil War.

Victoria met James in St. Louis in the mid-1860s. Twenty-six years old and strikingly beautiful, she was working as a medium and a “spiritual physician” when James consulted her, seeking treatment for wounds suffered in battle. She fell into a trance and announced that their destinies were linked. James liked the idea: Obeying the spirits, they left St. Louis and their spouses behind. The new marriage lasted barely a decade—but it was some decade.

In New York, the soothsaying of this Blood-by-marriage morphed into investment advice (lapped up by an aged Cornelius Vanderbilt), and Victoria made “an utter fortune from her wildness,” as Kaag puts it. She founded a brokerage house and a crusading weekly newspaper, and waged energetic campaigns for free love and equal rights. Kaag concedes that Victoria’s “methods” as a healer and fortune teller “were fraudulent—which is to say too wild for belief.” He doesn’t try to make sense of her dishonesty, or condemn the blatant hypocrisy of her final incarnation: Having ditched James, she married a rich English banker, renouncing radicalism to secure for herself “the standing and success that women of previous generations could not have envisioned.” Kaag leaves it to the reader to connect her successive self-reinventions with the larger Blood narrative.

Having toured this gallery of “untamed beasts” exhibiting so many different shades of American wildness, we might ask what wild means to Kaag himself. I’m not sure. But it’s clear that one important step in his quest to make space for the “contradictions and tensions and paradoxes” of daily life has been coming to terms with Benjamin Blood, a promiscuously talented poet-philosopher. Benjamin’s rhapsodic mysticism, eccentricity, and primal vigor were particularly appealing to William James. This Blood taught Kaag’s hero that “the secret of Being,” in James’s words, “is not the dark immensity beyond knowledge, but at home, this side, beneath the feet, and overlooked by knowledge.”

A practical idealist, high-minded yet of the people (he’s been called “a mystic of the commonplace”), Benjamin was born in 1832 in upstate New York. Over the course of his 86 years, he was an inventor, a gambler, a gymnast, and a boxer, as well as a poet, metaphysician, and compulsive writer of letters to the editor—in short, the antithesis of a library-bound thinker. Dissatisfied with philosophizing, he told James that he “felt compelled to go into more active life,” to work 10 hours a day in a local mill. “I have worn out many styles,” he boasted, “and am cosmopolitan, liberal to others, and contented with myself.” His intellectual pursuits, Kaag writes, should be regarded “as an afterthought to action, the trace of a life lived as fully as possible.”

Deeply impressed by a self-published pamphlet, The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy (1874), James struck up a correspondence with the author and eventually volunteered to try to make him famous. He kept his word: The last essay he ever wrote, “ A Pluralistic Mystic ” (1910), is a hymn to Benjamin’s uncommon merit.

James directs our attention to a remarkable passage in which Benjamin explains that “the universe is wild—game flavored as a hawk’s wing.” Celebrating the contingent and the unfinished, Benjamin declares that “nature is miracle all. She knows no laws; the same returns not, save to bring the different.” We can never fully grasp reality; our understanding, in Benjamin’s words, is “ever not quite.” Or as James himself insisted, uneasy about what seemed an oppressively bureaucratic and professionalized 20th century, “There is no complete generalization, no total point of view.”

Kaag warmly welcomes the idea of the incomplete, of a cobbled-together and eternally unfinished worldview; he finds it frustrating but also encouraging. At the same time, he can’t resist imposing an overarching unity. Eager to wrap things up neatly, he claims that Benjamin Blood’s philosophy of open-ended, open-hearted pluralism—and of active engagement in the wider world—somehow “silently guided the Blood family from its very inception.” And yet the thought of the whole crew, from Thomas to Perez to Victoria, all wedded to a single ethos hardly sits well with Benjamin’s belief that “the genius of being is whimsical rather than consistent.”

What does this have to do with America? Kaag is telling us that wildness is with us always, yesterday and today, even the dangerous, corrupt, fraudulent varieties, but that beneficent wildness makes room for exploration, new ideas, new ways of being. A more perfect union is always possible—though ever not quite.

This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Wild Blood Dynasty.”

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

COMMENTS

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One of the things Gaiman does in American Gods - and it is a book which does many things and does them well - is fantasticate the Midwest … America, in other words, is not just a melting pot of races: it is a melting pot of gods. While working for Odin, Shadow meets, among others, a leprechaun named Mad Sweeney, an Eastern European god called Czernobog and Egyptian deities like Bast and ...
Amazon.com: American Gods: A Novel: 9780063081918: Gaiman, Neil: Books
Paperback - Illustrated, March 16, 2021. From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, a contemporary masterpiece combing mythology, adventure, and illusion―one of ten classic Gaiman works repackaged with elegant original watercolor art by acclaimed artist Henry Sene Yee. Released from prison, Shadow finds his world turned upside down.
Amazon.com: American Gods: A Novel: 9780062572233: Gaiman, Neil: Books
American Gods: A Novel. Paperback - March 28, 2017. Now a STARZ® Original Series produced by FremantleMedia North America starring Ricky Whittle, Ian McShane, Emily Browning, and Pablo Schreiber. Locked behind bars for three years, Shadow did his time, quietly waiting for the day when he could return to Eagle Point, Indiana.
Review
One of the things Gaiman does in American Gods -- and it is a book which does many things and does them well -- is fantasticate the Midwest. Gaiman is an English expatriate, now living in Minnesota. He is able to depict the American heartland with the knowledge of a resident and the perspective of an outsider.
'American Gods' Review: A Holy Feast For The Senses
American Gods aspires to explore both halves of its title, and many episodes open with a flashback to how one old deity or another found their way onto our shores, to in time become part of this ...
American Gods: A Novel : Gaiman, Neil: Amazon.ca: Books
American Gods: A Novel. Paperback - Illustrated, March 16 2021. From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, a contemporary masterpiece combing mythology, adventure, and illusion―one of ten classic Gaiman works repackaged with elegant original watercolor art by acclaimed artist Henry Sene Yee. Released from prison, Shadow finds ...
American Gods: A Novel by Gaiman, Neil
Neil Gaiman is the New York Times bestselling and multi-award winning author and creator of many beloved books, graphic novels, short stories, film, television and theatre for all ages. He is the recipient of the Newbery and Carnegie Medals, and many Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Will Eisner Awards. Neil has adapted many of his works to television series, including Good Omens (co-written ...
American Gods: A Novel by Neil Gaiman
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, a contemporary masterpiece combing mythology, adventure, and illusion―one of ten classic Gaiman works repackaged with elegant original watercolor art by acclaimed artist Henry Sene Yee. Released from prison, Shadow finds his world turned upside down. His wife has been killed; a stranger offers him a job and Shadow, with nothing to lose ...
American Gods a book by Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of books for children and adults whose award-winning titles include Norse Mythology, American Gods, The Graveyard Book, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), Coraline, and The Sandman graphic novels. Neil Gaiman is a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR and Professor in the Arts at Bard College.
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'American Bloods' and the Wild Blood Dynasty
Kaag, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, lives in a house on the banks of the Concord River that was built in 1745 by a colonial named Josiah Blood. A decade ...

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