Marval Movie

The story starts with a man named Shadow in prison serving his sentence. When his sentence is done, coming up in a few weeks, he knows exactly what he's going to do. He's going to go back to his home town and get back his old job, working with his best friend and be with his loving wife again. However Shadow gets called in to the warden one day and he learns that his wife and best friend have both died in a car crash, due to this tragedy he gets an early release. What now?

Neil Gaiman is one the best types of authors, the ones with his own voice. The way he sets up a scene and the way a conversations unravels are done in a unique style that you can identify as "pure Gaiman" with all the quirks and personalities that he injects into his characters. Like the fact that Shadow can do coin tricks.

With his wife now dead Shadow doesn't know what to do, but he heads for home anyway while on the plane a mysterious stranger is sitting next to him the man says his name is Mr. Wednesday and he has a job for him. Mr. Wednesday has a beard, a glass eye and what is described as a large smile that has nothing to do with being happy and promises Shadow that if he takes up his job offer within a few years he will have everything he wants. Being that Shadow has nothing else going for him he accepts the job as Mr. Wednesday's bodyguard.

The thing is Mr. Wednesday isn't what he initially appears he is Odin the Norse god himself and he has a very important job for shadow. Wednesday and Shadow drive around and go to see Wednesday's friends, who are also gods themselves. It turns out that all the ancient gods of mythology at one point came to America and have been slowly weakening and some have died. But now they need to gather because of whats coming for all these gods.

It is then revealed that with its "Old Gods" in America it has also got some "New Gods" (possible reference to Jack Kirby?). These are not the gods born from the Vikings, the Romans, Greek's or Aztecs but born of modern worshiping. There is an Internet god and a god of cell phones (unless there's a god of movies and comics then I've contributed very little to these gods). The New Gods want the Old Gods out and so now Shadow is in the middle of a huge war between two types of gods.

Within the main story there are little short stories that cap off a chapter every once-in-a-while. These stories mostly go back into the past and show some of the origins of when some of the gods (some that feature in the story and some that don't). The stories by themselves are enjoyable, my favorite is about a cab driver in New York that's an old Indian god. My issue with them are that they aren't in a chapter of their own and due to the way I read I have to continue reading after I've already read a rather long chapter, so by the time I get to the short story I'm pretty tired. This is my fault and my fault only, you see when I read a book I read one chapter a day, this is my persoalan and nobody else, but if anyone else reads books this way keep this in mind.

American Gods is all about finding the core or the heart of America, but to some it may seem strange that of all people Neil Gaiman is writing this story, certainly none can deny that he's a brilliant writer, but he's British (born and bred) so how, or what right some might say, does he have to tell people what the core of America is? Well Gaiman does live in America and his response to that criticism, I feel is entirely justified, he said that his view a "America" is no different than someone who lives in Seattle that has never been to New York, now writing about New York. Gaiman isn't trying to write the "real America" he's giving the audience an America, a fictional America that exists for the story.

Ironically, even though Gaiman has a house in America most of it wasn't written there. American Gods was written at Gaiman's friends house in Ireland. It was a cold house where there was no internet access so all he could do was write. He later finished the rest of in a Las Vegas hotel.

One of the reasons this book was written was because for a while Gaiman was "stuck" writing conventional story-lines, he had to deliver a lot of screenplays, whether they be the Neverwhere movie or a movie version of Death: The High Cost of Living with "a twenty page beginning, eighty pages of middle and a twenty page end." American Gods plays out very unconventionally, there is a beginning and an end of course but the middle is the real juicy bit where it becomes many things, its fantasy and horror, but also for a few chapters its a road story, and others its a suburban drama. The book doesn't get weighed down with being only one thing, just like America itself its many things.

The edition that I've read is the Preferred Text Edition. When American Gods was first released, in 2001 it was cut down by around twelve thousand words, the book came out and was a huge success. Then on its tenth anniversary it was decided that Gaiman would be allowed to release the book as he originally intended only thing was with cutting out all the words before the book had to go through a slight re-write and Gaiman ended up liking that version so this time the book had to be rewritten again so that the story flows better with the added material. Now we have a huge six-hundred plus page book that tells this epic. This is the only version that I've read so I can't say weather the extended version or the original release is the better of the two but I can confirm that whatever version of American Gods you end up reading it will be a great read.

As some people may remember from what I said about Supergods, I mostly read books that are about two-hundred pages. So being that American Gods is over six-hundred pages it was a real commitment on my part and again I wouldn't have done it for many other writers than Neil Gaiman and with its huge amount of awards. When American Gods was released it won the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, Sfx and Locus award, there are author's that would give up their feet for just one of those awards and yet American Gods won all of them. All of its worth your time.

American Gods may not be the real America that you go and visit or are even living in right now but there is still a slice or an essence to what that mysterious great strange country is really all about.

Rating: 4 stars out of 4