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Back when the show American Gods was airing, I covered the show for TGON. I had wanted to read the book but never made time to but was thrilled to be the one covering the show. Unfortunately, the show ended before the end of the book. Well, I finally finished the book and wanted to talk about it with you too. Hang on a sec. Let me get my thoughts in order because I have a lot of opinions. OK, let’s go.
I want to start off by saying Neil Gaiman has an incredible gift for writing worlds behind our world. The worlds he creates are incredible, vivid, and seamless though some of them make you go, “Wow, how?”. Mr. Gaiman has a very distinct writing style. I have not read as much of him as my sister-in-law but enough to see it, I even find it in The Sandman, which makes sense as Mr. Gaiman is his author too. While Neil is wonderful at describing stuff, I sometimes feel he doesn’t describe the right things. He spends a lot of describing coin tricks, but I would have more description of what was going on in Shadow’s head.
Speaking of which, everything rolls off of Shadow like water off a duck’s back. Let me go back and give a description of what goes on in the story, just in case you don’t know, and I will finish my gripe. We meet Shadow in prison. He is about to get in a few days, he’s got all his ducks in a row on the inside and the outside until his wife dies and he is released early. On the way home, he meets Mr. Wednesday (and yes, I spelled it wed-nes-day in my head), who makes a proposal for a job that he refuses because he already has one. He runs into Wednesday again, who offers again and proves Shadow has no job to go home to because his friend and boss are dead too. He finds out his wife is cheating on him when he calls his buddy’s wife to offer his condolences. In fact, she was cheating on him when she died in a car accident. When he returns on Wednesday, he accepts his offer. He learns Gods are real, both old and new, and that there is a war brewing. He goes “backstage” on more than one occasion. His wife comes back from the dead. Yeah, I would be catatonic, and it barely fazes Shadow. No one would be as unbothered as him. He doesn’t even raise his voice much. I’d be screaming.
I love the amount of gods that are represented here, even how they are depicted. He put them in jobs they would be suited to or would fit into easily. For example, Czernobog was in euthanizing cattle, and Thoth was in the funeral business, writing people’s stories. They had different levels of wealth. Think of the differences between Easter, Mr. Ibis and Jaquel, and Mama Ji.
The show does alright in staying true to the book. In most cases, so much is left out of a screen adaptation because there is so much detail in the book. The opposite seems to have happened here. The book doesn’t have enough detail about things that the show added to a scene to make it better. The biggest example I can think of is the part at Easter’s (Eostre). The grounds of the estate in the show are lush and gorgeous, with decorations and food everywhere. There were multiple versions of gods there, the funniest being the amount of Jesuses. In the book, the view was markedly less.
Overall, I struggled to get through American Gods. The book was dry, and it dragged. There is next to no action. The one fight I can think of throughout the whole book was in the beginning between Shadow and Mad Sweeney, and it wasn’t much of one. I don’t know if the problem here is because I read books with a lot of physical action. I do know that for me, if I book makes me physically react, whether it is to show emotion or my chest is tight because I gotta know what happens next, I am more apt to like it. I didn’t get that with this. The last five or six chapters were easy to get through, but I thought the ending was pretty anticlimactic. I must say, though, that I loved the postscript. I won’t ruin it. The show was better, though.
Have you read the book, watched the show, or both? What are your thoughts on any or all of it? Let me know in the comments below. Until next time, have fun storming the castle!
