Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough and looked don’t-fuck-with-me enough that his biggest problem was killing time. So he kept himself in shape, and taught himself coin tricks, and thought a lot about how much he loved his wife.

I first heard the opening lines of “American Gods” read by Neil Gaiman himself about twelve years ago, at a CBLDF (Comic Book Legal Defense Fund) fundraiser held at my old college. At the time, I attended Art Center College of Design in sunny Pasadena, and when I heard that Gaiman– who wrote “The Sandman,” one of my favorite comics ever– would be speaking, I was thrilled. I made a point of attending, and being the budding artiste, I sketched him in one of my old sketchbooks. While I drew, he read from his new book, and I was immediately hooked: it sounded like the coolest thing ever. I knew I would love this story– what was it called? Oh yeah… “American Gods.” Awesome!

Anyway, after the talk, I gave him the sketch, thanked him, and went off, pleased as punch. I figured I would get the book when it came out, so I would find out what happened to Shadow.

But things didn’t quite work out that way. I got distracted by school and later by work, and I never got around to reading “American Gods,” even though all of my friends assured me it was great and I would love it. But I wasn’t sure whether I should believe them. After all, I had been disappointed by Gaiman’s film “Mirrormask”– what if “American Gods” disappointed me too? It would be so depressing!

And as the years went by, and more people told me how great it was, I resisted reading it more and more. I thought I would read it eventually, but I never felt like it, and I always figured I could get around to it later.

Well, a few weeks ago, when I was at the library, I saw that “American Gods” was actually in for once. It was such an odd sensation– but I could almost feel the book calling out to me. Joanne, read me! You know you want to read me! READ ME, DAMNIT! I had just finished reading “The Hunger Games” (which I found pretty underwhelming), and I was keen to read something different. So I thought, “why not! what the hell,” and whisked it off the shelves.

I’m not sorry I did it. Because all my friends were right.

As you can imagine, it’s rare to find a book that is as good as everyone says it is– but “American Gods” actually delivers the goods. And then some. Its Hugo and Nebula are well deserved, as it is easily one of the best fantasy novels of the past decade. The last time I felt this strongly about a book was Dan Simmons’ “Hyperion”… but if I was going to rate the two, “American Gods” just edges out “Hyperion,” because it’s a great standalone, while “Hyperion” is saddled with a following series that declines slightly in quality with every subsequent entry.

As I discovered twelve years ago, the beginning of “American Gods” grabs you and doesn’t let go. The book tells the adventures of Shadow, a big, quiet, down-to-earth guy just released from prison who learns that his beloved wife is dead. Reeling from shock, he winds up in the employ of a mysterious old one-eyed man named Wednesday; and just he’s trying to sort out who his new boss is, he finds himself smack dab in the middle of a war. But it’s not just any war– it’s a war between the old gods and the new.

You see, in Gaiman’s America, the gods feed on belief, and each wave of immigrants– from the original natives crossing the landbridge, to voudoun-practicing West African slaves, to the new millennium’s Arabs and Indians walking out of airports– bring over their own gods and beliefs. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the Algonquin trickster Wisakedjak, Welsh Gwydion, Elegba of the crossroads, the ifrit of the Saudi desert or elephant-headed Ganesh; they’re all here, and all waxing or waning, prospering or declining, always dependent on the beliefs of America’s masses of humanity. This is not a new idea, but I’ve never seen it executed with such style, conviction or sincerity as it is here.

Once you’re on board, the plot surges forward like a car down a endless highway. Quite simply, this book is the road trips to end all road trips. With Mr. Wednesday as his guide, Shadow travels across the Midwest and beyond, from Chicago to San Francisco and back again, having lots of adventures and meeting tons of unforgettable characters along the way– like the wise-cracking and ribald Mister Nancy, the pedantic undertaker Ibis, as well as the voluptuous hippie chick Easter. But the new gods– technology, TV, money– mercilessly dog his heels, alternately threatening and attempting to seduce him over to their side. For a time, he stashes himself away in the North Woods, living in a crackerbox apartment in a tiny and lovable Wisconsin town; but then he discovers that this town, while cute as a button, has plenty of dark secrets, and old enemies have a way of keep popping up at the most inconvenient times.

With the help of his friends, Shadow flees again, hoping somehow, in some way, to help Mr. Wednesday’s cause. But all the while, as the war of the gods rushes to a head, the mystery of dead children haunts him… and he wonders how best he can rescue his dead wife, who somehow won’t stay dead…

Occasionally the pacing is not rushed. Sometimes I found myself wishing that there were fewer tangents (or what I thought were tangents) and the story would cut quicker to the action; but I realized, in the end, there is not one single wasted word. Like a well-woven tapestry, all the threads of the plot are tied together at the end in an inevitable and rewarding conclusion.

This book touches on a lot of familiar tropes like Luke I am Your Father and Town with a Dark Secret, but it manages to be fantastically inventive and original– in fact, I’ve never read a book quite like it. At times I was reminded of Stephen King or even Jack Kerouac, in its humorous, loving evocation of America’s endless rolling landscapes, peppered with plenty of savvy, on-the-nose pop culture references; but then you have the archetypal magical realism more reminiscent of Tanith Lee or even Ted Chiang. More than any other author I’ve read lately, Gaiman manages to evoke how the past and present interweave… how today and tens of thousands of years ago are only separated by the blink of an eye.

It’s rare when I can find a 500 page book that was such a joy to read– I was sad to see it end. The romantic that I am, I wish that Shadow could have ended up with Laura or even his buddy Samantha; but I don’t think this would have worked. It’s rich, satisfying, epic, but with written with a deft touch and flashes of wry humor (like the neo-pagan coffeehouse waitress in San Francisco who insists she only worships an unnamed ‘feminine principle’ and is offended when Mr. Wednesday rubs her nose in actual ancient religious practices).

I’m picky about my prose, but here– there’s nothing to criticize. The prose itself is flawless. It’s breathtaking, with prose that ranges from the profane to sacred, from the hilarious to the hauntingly beautiful. The novel has a comic, witty aspect, but it is also steeped in mysticism; although I was eager to find out what happened next, there were many parts where I forced myself to read slowly as to savor the sentences. In the story’s evocation of unthinkably ancient gods and lost ways of life, I would often feel a chill.

To show you, here’s an extended passage from one of the many exquisitely written dream sequences in the story:

Sleep took him then, without Shadow noticing.

He was walking…

He was walking through a room bigger than a city, and everywhere he looked there were statues and carvings and rough- hewn images. He was standing beside a statue of a womanlike thing: her naked breasts hung flat and pendulous on her chest, around her waist was a chain of severed hands, both of her own hands held sharp knives, and, instead of a head, rising from her neck there were twin serpents, their bodies arched, facing each other, ready to attack. There was something profoundly disturbing about the statue, a deep and violent wrongness. Shadow backed away from it.

He began to walk through the hall. The carved eyes of those statues that had eyes seemed to follow his every step.

In his dream, he realized that each statue had a name burning on the floor in front of it. The man with the white hair, with a necklace of teeth about his neck, holding a drum, was Leucotios; the broad-hipped woman with monsters dropping from the vast gash between her legs was Hubur; the ram-headed man holding the golden ball was Hershef.

A precise voice, fussy and exact, was speaking to him, in his dream, but he could see no one.

“These are gods who have been forgotten, and now might as well be dead. They can be found only in dry histories. They are gone, all gone, but their names and their images remain with us.”

Shadow turned a corner, and knew himself to be in another room, even vaster than the first. It went on farther than the eye could see. Close to him was the skull of a mammoth, polished and brown, and a hairy ocher cloak, being worn by a small woman with a deformed left hand. Next to that were three women, each carved from the same granite boulder, joined at the waist: their faces had an unfinished, hasty look to them, although their breasts and genitalia had been carved with elaborate care; and there was a flightless bird which Shadow did not recognize, twice his height, with a beak like a vulture’s, but with human arms: and on, and on.

The voice spoke once more, as if it were addressing a class, saying, “These are the gods who have passed out of memory. Even their names are lost. The people who worshiped them are as forgotten as their gods. Their totems are long since broken and cast down. Their last priests died without passing on their secrets.

“Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.” (pg. 46 in the 2001 hardcover edition)

American Gods has many delights, but as you can see from the above passage, it is also full of death. As I stated earlier, one of Shadow’s quests is to bring his dead wife back to life; but this doesn’t end quite as you think it might.

I was particularly impressed with the richness and depth of all of the characters. Gaiman’s writing is warm and generous; he even seems to love and understand the villains. There is a deep and abiding humanity here. Mr. Town, the beefy, bullying government spook who loathes our hero Shadow above all things, actually comes to an ignominious yet vulnerable end that actually made me quite sad. I didn’t expect that at all, and that was delightful. It was a wonderful antidote to the flat, rote, asexual writing in “The Hunger Games.” “American Gods” practically throbs with life– all at once it’s sensual, unexpected, provocative, even at times horrific, but all in all, fun. And yet it has a way of getting under your skin– and making you look differently at the world around you.

The gods are with us. The gods are all around us.

But the story’s right. America is a bad land for gods.

I checked this out from my local library, but it’s available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Indiebound.

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