Shadow loses his real name in the search for a second chance, in the vigil he makes for his deceased father and employer, and we never get to really learn his actual name, but that does not really matter, anyway. American Gods is everything a novel has to be in order to be believable and beloved. It might sound like not a great deed these times, but Gaiman dares found new mythology and start a war between the old Gods and the new ones, which impersonate all the raw sins of modern and early days. He manages to do this masterfully and during that process, he takes us through this frenetic roller-coaster hand in hand with a guy called “Shadow”, who ends up being the only heir of Odin in America. It is an ambitious engaging novel that despite its complexity, can be summarized in a few words: a journey; a search for our place in the world, for our true mission.
Shadow is a recently-released convict who is allowed to leave prison a bit earlier due to the tragic deaths of his wife and his best friend. On the way home, a mysterious old man with a glass eye proposes him a job that he ends up accepting. He ends up finding out that his wife died with his best friend’s cock in her mouth. While he tries to reunite with his new employer, he engages in a brief fight with the biggest dwarf in the world, an Irish drunk who accidentally gives him a magical silver dollar. Additionally, he is threatened by a psychotic fat boy in a limousine. Both of these characters warn him to be wary with his employer, Wednesday, an old charming man with a crazy addiction for bedding barely legal blondes. His dead wife pays him a visit that very same night, and he discovers that she has come back to make it up for him and protect him from the new gods who want to clear him out of the way. This is just the very first two hundred and fifty pages of the novel, and then the journey to convince other old gods of joining them on their struggle with the new gods continues almost nonstop.
American Gods is a very skillful suspense fantasy yarn with an ending that surprises everyone, but that makes perfect sense. There are plenty of passages with exhilarating fragments of highly imaginative mythology. In the process, Gaiman manages to take us on a tour around the United States, its people, their way of living and even the way they talk. Consumerism, capitalism and the media-saturated environment are captured in this masterpiece, as well. American Gods is a one-of-a-kind story, but not exactly the easiest to read; therefore, I would only recommend it for whom I consider mature readers. I guess you might wonder what a mature reader is, and I would dare define them as the kind of critical readers who can do the most of his reading and writing and use his background knowledge to make sense of the real and the fictional world and embrace a story as if it were their own. All in all, American Gods is a must-read for all fans of storytelling and fantasy. A masterpiece from one of the best narrators of our times.
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