A Road Trip Through the Mythic Underbelly of America
Review of Neil Gaiman’s "American Gods" (2001)
Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001) is part road novel, part mythology, part crime thriller, and entirely unlike anything else.
It is a book that takes the American familiar—diners, highways, small towns—and stretches them over an ancient framework of gods and legends brought to America by generations of immigrants, who must now wage war with the new deities of media, technology, and progress.
“There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.”
It's a book that makes you question what exactly you've been worshiping at your laptop screen.
I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.
The Gods Are Among Us
The novel follows Shadow Moon, a quiet, brooding ex-con who gets out of prison only to find his life in pieces.
His wife is dead, his job is gone, and a mysterious grifter named Mr. Wednesday offers him employment as a bodyguard. What seems like a straightforward gig quickly spirals into something much stranger.
Wednesday is no ordinary conman—he’s Odin, the Norse All-Father, and he’s recruiting for an impending war between the old gods (those brought to America by immigrants—Norse, Slavic, African, Native American) and the new gods (media, technology, celebrity, globalisation).
“I told you I would tell you my names. This is what they call me. I'm called Glad-of-War, Grim, Raider, and Third. I am One-Eyed. I am called Highest, and True-Guesser. I am Grimnir, and I am the Hooded One. I am All-Father, and I am Gondlir Wand-Bearer. I have as many names as there are winds, as many titles as there are ways to die. My ravens are Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory; my wolves are Freki and Geri; my horse is the gallows.”
As Shadow follows Wednesday across the country, he meets a bizarre and eerie cast of characters—gods disguised as morticians, cab drivers, strippers, and drunks.
“You got to understand the god thing. It’s not magic. It’s about being you, but the you that people believe in. It’s about being the concentrated, magnified, essence of you. It’s about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief and become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize.” He paused. “And then one day they forget about you, and they don’t believe in you, and they don’t sacrifice, and they don’t care, and the next thing you know you’re running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third.”
But getting them all on the same side involves much meandering and manoeuvring.
“Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don't take naturally to it.”
Alongside them lurk the sinister new deities, who want America for themselves.
“There are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance. "They are aware of us, they fear us, and they hate us," said Odin. "You are fooling yourselves if you believe otherwise.”
The novel is full of strange encounters, cryptic conversations, and moments where reality bends just a little too far.
A man is swallowed whole by a goddess during sex.
A dead woman comes back to life and refuses to stay put.
A coin tossed in the air takes far too long to land.
Every chapter pulses with a sense that something ancient and dangerous is lurking just beneath the surface of everyday life.
Where Gaiman shines
The book draws from sources as varied as Studs Terkel's oral histories and ancient Egyptian funeral rites, exploring what it means to have a god, or to be one.
“[To be a god] means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.”
The writing oscillates between hard-boiled noir and mythic grandeur. The prose is crisp, often poetic, and occasionally eerie in its simplicity:
“Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”
Some of Shadow's musings feel profound in the moment, questionable after a few chapters, but nonetheless profounder by the end of the book.
“People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe, and then they do not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjuration. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe; and it is that rock solid belief, that makes things happen.”
And elsewhere:
“There was a tale he had read once, long ago, as a small boy: the story of a traveler who had slipped down a cliff, with man-eating tigers above him and a lethal fall below him, who managed to stop his fall halfway down the side of the cliff, holding on for dear life. There was a clump of strawberries beside him, and certain death above him and below. What should he do? went the question. And the reply was, Eat the strawberries. The story had never made sense to him as a boy. It did now.”
The novel is at its best when it explores the hidden pockets of America—the forgotten roadside attractions, the crumbling motels, the diners that feel like they haven’t changed since the 1950s.
“How you want your coffee?” she asked her guests. “Here we take it black as night, sweet as sin.”
These places hum with an uneasy magic, as if they’re waiting for something to wake up.
“If Hell is other people... then Purgatory is airports.”
Gaiman’s America is not the one you see in travel brochures. It’s the America of faded dreams and shifting identities, an America haunted by the ghosts of those who came before.
“Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine.
The story is also packed with mythological references. You don’t need to know them all to enjoy the novel, but if you do, it’s a treasure trove. Czernobog, Anansi, Thoth, Ibis and Loki all make appearances, each given a modern twist that somehow feels entirely natural.
“The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.”
And then there are the literary references peppered in dialogue:
“Hey," said Shadow. "Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are."
The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.
"Say 'Nevermore,'" said Shadow.
"Fuck you," said the raven.
What might disappoint you
The book can feel sprawling and unfocused. Shadow is often a passive protagonist, drifting from event to event, absorbing strangeness without much resistance.
While that makes sense for a man caught between worlds, it also means he sometimes feels like less of a character and more of an observer.
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories.
Gaiman is in love with digressions, and not all of them add to the story. The interludes—short vignettes about gods and spirits arriving in America—are often beautifully written but can feel like interruptions.
The pacing can be glacial in the middle, and by the time the big reveal comes, you may have guessed where it’s heading.
“Jesus. Low-Key Lyesmith," said Shadow. and then he heard what he was saying and he understood. "Loki," he said. "Loki Lie-smith."
"You're slow," said Loki, "but you get there in the end."
The Verdict: A Mythic Puzzle Box
Like the land it describes, American Gods is big, weird, and occasionally difficult to traverse.
“One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. You must remember this.”
Though unsettling, it is also profound, beautiful, and brimming with the kind of dreamlike imagery that sticks with you long after you close it.
Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, American Gods has become a touchstone of contemporary fantasy literature. Its 2017 TV adaptation brought renewed attention to the book's prescient themes about belief and technology.
It is a book for those who enjoy stories that wander. Gaiman takes you on a road trip where every shadow hides something ancient, and every town has a secret. Whether you enjoy the ride depends on how much you like getting lost.
Read Next:
China Miéville's Perdido Street Station and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell offer similarly ambitious fantasy.
In non-fiction, Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America offers a shotgun-seat view of the American outskirts.
“What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.”
But, if you just want more Gaiman, albeit with tighter storytelling, The Ocean at the End of the Lane delivers his mythic weirdness in a more compact, emotionally driven package.
And of course, his Norse Mythology offers you Odin, Loki and the rest in their original tales.