someone gave me the new 10th anniversary edition, and I haven't read it since it originally came out and I don't know if it's just the sort of book that needs to be reread to be properly appreciated or if it's the nearly 12,000 extra words restored from an earlier draft, but I went from, 'yeah, I liked that,' to 'that is a brilliant piece of work.' It's a great novel, period, and I did not want it to come to an end. A great companion piece to Sandman, too, oddly enough, playing variations on themes and characters touched on there. This also includes the terrific novella Monarch Of The Glen as an extra, and now I'm really looking forward to the sequel.

2021: listened to the audio book becuase I am wallowing in comfort listening DON'T JUDGE ME

Found my original review, in a self-published zine, from, presumably, 2001:

This was a good month for books, which was a relief, considering the deteriorating state of what passes for content on our television and cinema screens. I’m not even going to bother with a Telly Visual review this issue, and if I were to tell you now that the closest I come to a wholehearted recommendation in the film section is that I didn’t hate Jurrasic Park 3, then you might throw your hands in the air in disgust and possibly cause an accident if you’re driving or cycling or directing landing aircraft or semaphoring to ships on the briny deep or holding a hot beverage in your hand. So I’ll leave that depressing revelation for later.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman is a book I probably should have been anticipating with great fervour, but seeing as I quite frankly no longer expected anything from Gaiman save for the odd short story (always welcome: one of the few writers whose short stories I actively seek out) and even if he did write something longer, well, sad thoughts of Neverwhere would put an end to any excitement. But it turns he’s been working on American Gods for the last few years and boom, here it is and it’s everything you could hope a Neil Gaiman novel would be. It has myths and stories and old, old ideas turned to skilfully catch new light. It has mysteries and secrets, it has pain and horror, it has humour and pathos, it has a hero that’s somewhere between a holy fool and an enigmatic cipher, and just when you think he’s letting it all end in futile (but entirely appropriate) anti--climax, he hits you with a resounding sucker-punch.

Shadow is our passive, shell-shocked hero, let out of prison early after the ugly death of his wife in a car accident. The mysterious Mr. Wednesday hires him as bodyguard, chauffer, straight man and general dogsbody and they embark on a fitful journey through America as Wednesday tries to rally support from a succession of bizarre characters for a desperate cause: these are the old gods, carried by immigrants from other lands to the new continent of America where they have struggled to survive with dwindling followers and smaller scraps of belief to keep them real, while the new gods of television, the internet and the media reign supreme. But are the new gods out to destroy the old? Wednesday thinks so, and is attempting to organise a unified resistance. The old gods, however, are cantankerous and individualist to a fault and the new gods aren’t too inclined to let him wander about gathering support for his cause, either. What follows is a sly, dreamy, scary trip through the more eccentric tourist spots of America and we discover something about the nature of belief, and why America is not a good place to be a god. This was one of those rare instances where I consciously slowed down my reading to prolong the experience. Partly because I wanted to savour the well crafted, finely balanced, highly atmospheric prose and absorb the meaning and import of the nested stories scattered around the book like seeds, but also because, as a long-time Sandman reader, it’s just so good to read Gaiman back on top of his form again. He writes books and comics and stories you could hang around in forever. It does read like a first novel, though, and sometime the great ideas overbalance the story, and sometmes the cool story clouds the development of the great ideas. He clearly prefers the obscure old gods and dwells on them agreeably for some time. The new gods of the internet etc. get short shrift, however; a few superficial passes, like Shadow’s coin tricks. They catch your eye, you never get a good look at them and then they’re gone. This is slightly frustrating, because they sound quite interesting and could have done with further development. Perhaps this reflects Gaiman’s prejudices: the new gods are slick, fleeting, and, once you get to know them, actully quite dull.

Still, American Gods is a good book, a great addition to the fantasy genre and with a bit of luck we can expect more like it. Hopefully, though, we won’t have to wait as long.