Neil Gaiman's "American Gods"

American Gods is a book written by Neil Gaiman... and regrettably, Gaiman's name is all that it has going for it, which is sad given his successes with Sandman and Neverwhere.

American Gods is the 2002 Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker award wining epic... in terms of verbosity and languid nature apparently.

If there is one way to succinctly explain what American Gods is the prime example of, it is this: It is a work that is "good in theory, bad in practice."

The idea is this: What happens when the ancient Gods meet today's modern Gods? What would happen if those Gods were to exist -- and what were to happen if the modern Gods and the ancient Gods not get along?

While the idea has much potential, it remains untapped in Gaiman's execution, thus the book falls flat. Even after a false start, where we are introduced to the protagonist, Shadow Moon. Shadow is a brooding, dense, insensate man about to be released from prison. Unlike most other people of the American prison system, he has a job, a faithful wife named Laura, and a good life waiting for him outside.

Of course, this all turns for the worst, as he finds out that both his wife and his employer are both dead from a car accident, and that he has no job. (Oh, and neatly put, Laura was having sexual relations with his friend, who happened to be his then-future employer. With an unnecessary twist meant to shock us, Laura died while performing fellatio on the aforementioned person, who was driving in the equally aforementioned car accident.) Thus being released a week early from prison, Shadow gets a plane ticket home. While en route, Shadow encounters the obese, grumpy, charming, and convoluted Mr. Wednesday, who job offers Shadow to be his muscle, and with much ado about nothing (a cliched bar fight, some fancy coin tricks, and some good ol' fashioned mead drinking), they go about the continental United States beating war drums and recruiting other forgotten gods to fight "today's gods" of Media, the Internet, and other staples of pop culture.

Which in and of itself isn't bad. Except Gaiman takes the opportunity to not only chronicle the lulls in this story, but also throw in short-story anecdotes about how the ancient gods came to America during the height of their power. The stories themselves range from interesting to downright boring, which jars the narrative. Are we to assume that this is an anthology book?

There are also dream sequences, apparently interspersed for no better reason than to reaffirm that this is a fantasy and to tie in with stories about the gods. Oh, and that Shadow has a gift. Or a destiny. Choose your own cliche.

Aside from treading new ground with this excellent premise, this book fails to hook us with any of the characters. We could care less about the wheeling and dealing that Wednesday (and, to a limited extent, Shadow) does. The characters are one-dimensional, lacking any verisimilitude or emotional believability, thus making it impossible for us to buy into the work.

Which is imperative when you want the reader to commit to reading a 600 page work.

This isn't a short story, so there's no excuse for Gaiman's eschewing characterization in lieu of story. Unfortunately, it seems like Gaiman decided to pump words, incongruent ideas, morsels of twisted brilliance ("Do you want to see Lucy's tits?"), tanks of sewage, and other leavings into a manuscript that could have been easily 150 pages in length.

This isn't "Lord of the Rings" here, after all. J.R.R. Tolkien had the decency to at least bring the world alive for his readers, even if becoming verbose in certain areas.

In terms of the incongruent narrative, aside from the over-use of flashback scenes that added nothing but clutter to the story, it eventually leads to a climax that is either loathed or loved. It's another "twist" in a book that already proved itself to be hard to pick up and far too easy to put down, douse with kerosene, and burn. It is revealed that Shadow was part of a "two man con" and that Wednesday's--revealed as the Norse god Odin, if that wasn't obvious from the get-go--war was meant to feed Odin and Loki. (Loki is a character we met earlier in the book, while Shadow was still in prison).

It was more of a knockout punch for the book, because Gaiman never cared to make us invest any emotional stock into any of the characters. We also never got to care about the revenging angel-esque character of the extremely dead Laura, for the brief times she appeared here and there, who seemed the more fleshed out of the bunch. Sadly, that's not saying too much.

Ultimately, American Gods is a sad effort, which reads like a first-draft narrative that deserved to be sliced of its 500+ pages of literary fat. If you must read the book, avoid buying it and instead go to a local library to put that library card to good use, since the book is a bad investment otherwise.