The wonderfully strange mind behind the Sandman comic series is at it again. This time with American Gods, a pretty cool piece of fiction that explores a plethora of American myths and legends. American Gods works on the premise that as man moved into the New World he brought the old world Gods with him. And although these Gods have a harder time in the modern world they’re still very much here and active. But now a war is brewing between the old Gods and the new Gods and our protagonist, a good hearted ex-con named Shadow is caught in the middle.
The cool thing about this book is that it explores all faiths, the story works well because all of the Gods are real and treated with respect. As everyone who reads these sort of books should know all it really takes for a God to be real is Faith… and maybe the occasional bloodshed in their honour. This in fact is the specific premise of the novel, Shadow gets recruited by the Allfather (Odin) to help him start a war. A very cool idea, gods warring against each other. Anyhow, as a book it generally speaking works well. I liked the interludes the most though. Every hundred pages or so they’d take a break from the storyline and explain how a certain sect of gods made the journey over to America. The writing for those sections really impressed me, as did the amount of research that must have gone into making this book. Gaiman has done an admirable job of capturing a weird and fascinating cultural idiom of America. Our relationship on the whole with our Gods is pretty different than anywhere else in the world, if anything simply in its diversity, and our cynical, or conditional faith. Gaiman tells a solid story that kept me really intrigued. Definitely worth the time invested.
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