Finished Neil Gaiman's charming book American Gods a couple of nights ago.
It's going to be the next big HBO show apparently and that was enough to finally get me to pull it down from the shelf where it has been sitting for some time and give it a read.
So; thumbnail synopsis, thumbnail review:
All of the gods and folk heroes and mythological creatures are real and they all of them live in America, where they have been forgotten, have withered from a lack of worship, and now haunt the truckstops and diners and motels and roadside attractions of the bleakest portions of the Midwest.
Our protagonist, a man called Shadow, gets out of jail, finds out his wife has died (well, she has sort of died) and promptly gets a job offer from Mr. Wednesday (get it? get it? it's all about as obscure as that) to work as a kind of personal assistant while he prepares for a war between the old diminished gods and the new gods of technology and consumerism.
Mostly the book is a roadtrip book. Really, what other narrative shape could a novel about America take? Anyway, on this roadtrip we get introduced to scores of different gods, some famous, others obscure. All are a bit down on their heels and threadbare and all have the stink of desperation on them. Their war against modernity and its idols seems doomed.
And really that's the long and the short of it. It's a very winning sort of decay and stagnation presented with the patina of mythic import. And It's a breeze of a read and you can't help but feel that it is an obvious candidate for the HBO treatment.
I liked it very much; I shouldn't have put it off as long as I did. Neither should you.
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