The storm was coming... For the three years Shadow spent in prison, he kept his head down and did his time. All he wanted was to get back to the loving arms of his wife, and to stay out of trouble for the rest of his life. But days before his scheduled release, his wife was killed in an accident, and his world became a colder place.

On the plane home to the funeral, Shadow meets a grizzled man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday, a self-declared grifter and rogue, who offers Shadow a job. And Shadow, a man with nothing to lose, accepts.

But working for Wednesday is not without its price, and Shadow soon learns that his role in Wednesday's schemes will be far more dangerous than he could have ever imagined. Entangled in a world of secrets and age-old mysteries, Shadow encounters, among others, the murderous Czernobog, the impish Mr. Nancy, and the beautiful Easter--all of whom seem to know more about Shadow than he himself knows.

Shadow will learn that the past does not die, that everyone, including his dead wife, had secrets, and that the stakes are higher than anyone could have imagined.

A storm is coming, and Shadow and Wednesday will soon be swept up into a brutal and epic conflict. For beneath the placid surface of everyday life a war is being fought--and the prize is the very soul of America.

American Gods is a dark and kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth and across an America at once eerily familiar and utterly alien. Magnificently told, American Gods is a work of literary magic that will haunt the reader far beyond the final page.

Related Categories:
Books > Fiction > Fantasy - Contemporary

It's appropriate that a writer who came to this country as an adult should attempt to forge a new mythology for his adopted homeland. One of the dominant myths of the U.S. is that of eternal newness, and Neil Gaiman's new novel insists that, in time, the past will catch up with us - and we should be ready for it.

Gaiman, an Englishman by birth, has obviously been closely observing his new home. American Gods is a big book, filled with vivid imagery, wacky locations, vigorous writing and intriguing, if sometimes scary, ideas and characters.

From the start we realize something odd is going on. People don't usually watch a passenger leave on a plane, then run into the same person at a bar in the next small town. Young men with eyes the color of old computer monitors, smoking something that smells like burning electrical parts, don't usually get driven around in large limos by large men who are more than willing to do their bidding. From the shocking beginning - which we won't spoil for you - onward, Gaiman takes us across the country, stopping off at some famous roadside attractions as well as some lesser known spots: the House on the Rock in Wisconsin figures prominently, as does Lebanon, Kansas, the exact center of America. But, as Gaiman notes in a Caveat, and Warning for Travelers, "This is a work of fiction, not a guidebook."

In American Gods there are pre-Columbus visits to these shores by Norwegians, Polynesians, Irish, Chinese and more. When these visitors died out, left or were killed, Gaiman explains, their gods stayed behind. Sometimes they changed form, grew or shrank, but they were always present.

The old gods' existence is threatened by the new gods, such as Media and Cancer. One of the old harsh gods has a plan to survive, and he will do whatever it takes to claw his way back to power.

American Gods will draw you in, make you want to drive or take the train across the country to experience the vastness that is the USA. Following the journeys taken in the book would make a heck of a road trip, but you'll be praying the events of the novel don't happen to you.

Gavin Grant lives in Brooklyn, where he reviews, writes and publishes speculative fiction.

Chapter One

The boundaries of our country, sir? Why sir, on the north we are bounded by the Aurora Borealis, on the east we are bounded by the rising sun, on the south we are bounded by the procession of the Equinoxes, and on the west by the Day of Judgment.

- The American Joe Miller's Jest Book

Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough and looked don't-fuck-with-me enough that his biggest problem was killing time. So he kept himself in shape, and taught himself coin tricks, and thought a lot about how much he loved his wife.

The best thing-in Shadow's opinion, perhaps the only good thing- about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get hurt, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.

It did not matter, Shadow decided, if you had done what you had been convicted of or not. In his experience everyone he met in prison was aggrieved about something: there was always something the authorities had got wrong, something they said you did when you didn't-or you didn't do quite like they said you did. What was important was that they had gotten you.

He had noticed it in the first few days, when everything, from the slang to the bad food, was new. Despite the misery and the titter skin-crawling horror of incarceration, he was breathing relief.

Shadow tried not to talk too much. Somewhere around the middle of year two he mentioned his theory to Low Key Lyesmith, his cellmate.

Low Key, who was a grifter from Minnesota, smiled his scarred smile. "Yeah," he said. "That's true. It's even better when you've been sentenced to death. That's when you remember the jokes about the guys who kicked their boots off as the noose flipped around their necks, because their friends always told them they'd die with their boots on."

"Is that a joke?" asked Shadow.

"Damn right. Gallows humor. Best kind there is."

"When did they last hang a man in this state?" asked Shadow.

"How the hell should I know?" Lyesmith kept his orange-blond hair pretty much shaved. You could see the lines of his skull. "Tell you what, though. This country started going to bell when they stopped hanging folks. No gallows dirt. No gallows deals."

Shadow shrugged. He could see nothing romantic in a death sentence.

If you didn't have a death sentence, he decided, then prison was, at best, only a temporary reprieve from life, for two reasons. First, life creeps back into prison. There are always places to go further down. Life goes on. And second, if you just hang in there, someday they're going to have to let you out.

In the beginning it was too far away for Shadow to focus on. Then it became a distant beam of hope, and he learned how to tell himself "this too shall pass" when the prison shit went down, as prison shit always did. One day the magic door would open and he'd walk through it. So he marked off the days on his Songbirds of North America calendar, which was the only calendar they sold in the prison commissary, and the sun went down and he didn't see it and the sun came up and he didn't see it. He practiced coin tricks from a book lie found in the wasteland of the prison library; and lie worked out; and he made lists in his head of what he'd do when he got out of prison.

Shadow's lists got shorter and shorter. After two years he had it down to three things.

First, he was going to take a bath. A real, long, serious soak, in a tub with bubbles. Maybe read the paper, maybe not. Some days he thought one way, some days the other.

Second he was going to towel himself off, put on a robe. Maybe slippers. He liked the idea of slippers. If he smoked he would be smoking a pipe about now, but he didn't smoke. He would pick up his wife in his arms ("Puppy," she would squeal in mock horror and real delight, "what are you doing?"). He would carry her into the bedroom, and close the door. They'd call out for pizzas if they got hungry.

Third, after he and Laura had come out of the bedroom, maybe a couple of days later, he was going to keep his head down and stay out of trouble for the rest of his life.

"And then you'll be happy?" asked Low Key Lyesmith. That day they were working in the prison shop, assembling bird feeders, which was barely more interesting than stamping out license plates.

"Call no man happy," said Shadow, "until he is dead."

"Herodotus," said Low Key. "Hey. You're learning."

"Who the fuck's Herodotus?" asked the Iceman, slotting together the sides of a bird feeder and passing it to Shadow, who bolted and screwed it tight.

"Dead Greek," said Shadow.

"My last girlfriend was Greek," said the Iceman. "The shit her family ate. You would not believe. Like rice wrapped in leaves. Shit like that."

The Iceman was the same size and shape as a Coke machine, with blue eyes and hair so blond it was almost white. He had beaten the crap out of some guy who had made the mistake of copping a feel off his girlfriend in the bar where she danced and the Iceman bounced. The guy's friends had called the police, who arrested the Iceman and ran a check on him which revealed that the Iceman had walked from a work-release program...

---

Excerpted from American Gods by Neil Gaiman Copyright © 2001 by Neil Gaiman
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

---