Review: American Gods

I'm never taking recommendations for books again for the rest of my life.

I was going to write this review over a year ago, but frankly I got bored and decided to shelve it for a while. With a television series set to air on Starz, I decided to give my thoughts on what might be the most anticipated show of the year for many people and why it's a big pile of dookie.

The Premise

Shadow Moon--I'm not joking--an experienced conman, is released from prison to find his wife has died in a car accident. After discovering she was having an affair with his best friend, Shadow reluctantly accepts an offer to be a bodyguard for the enigmatic Mr. Wednesday, a womanizing thief. There's more to Wednesday than Edgy Originalcharacter is led to believe, and before he realizes it Wednesday throws Fedoralord into a complex web of intrigue with a grab-bag of whatever shallow religious icons author Neil Gaiman could find.

Yawn.

The first thing that jumped out at me while listening to the twenty hour audiobook (465 pages, if Wikipedia is correct) is that very little actually happens in the plot. Euphoric Originalcharacterdonotsteal is constantly introduced to these fantastical deities covering a wide range of world religions with all the affect of a dirty old broom.

Gaiman must have taken the wrong inspirations from Stephen King, as long passages of nothing happening litter the pages of this Hugo-winning novel. At one point, Laughable Name decides to leave his hotel room to go into the lobby and agonize over a selection of potato chips before returning to his room to watch an episode of Jerry Springer, which is also described to the reader. Did that sound like an interesting series of events? Did you learn anything about the character or the world which, I must remind you, is full of a mish-mash of every deific entity of every major religion?

Unoriginal Joke is occasionally visited by his dead wife and the two jab at each other with smarmy quips that even Joss Whedon would heavily reconsider dropping in a script. Every single line out of the wife's mouth is about how inconvenient being dead is, and the reader is never really given much motivation into her actions aside from feeling bad about cheating on Melvin Dragonlord, and beyond that her character falls so flat that I could never get a read on what she was like before becoming a one-liner-spewing zombie.

Wednesday, an incarnation of the Norse God Odin, is perhaps the most cliched version of the God Gaiman could possibly have produced. A womanizing drunk, the character brings Shadow to a meeting of the Gods where they take their original forms, though most of them are unphased by Odin revealing that the new gods, a shadow group based on new technology, are seeking to usurp the gods of old.

This brings the crawling plot to a very minimal boost, introducing the central conflict. Maddeningly, this conflict has nothing at all to do with Shadow and the stakes are...

What are the stakes?

I still have no clue what the stakes are in this novel. If the American Gods defeat the Old World Gods, it's implied nothing at all will change. Stupid is offered multiple chances to simply leave, but because he has absolutely no character he decides to stand around to finish his stupid job. That's it. That's the plot of the whole novel--so where do the hundreds of pages come in?

Well, because this is somehow an important piece of work for Gaiman, several chapters are dedicated to short stories describing common people interacting with the old gods. These short stories take forever to finish and grind the already glacial pace of the novel to a halt with very little to show for it. Apparently Gaiman doesn't know that ifrits are not gods, and if that's the case why aren't more mystical creatures just kind of hanging around in the world? The story would have been far more fascinating if that were the case, but only one short story deals with this creature and it has one of the most dull, passionless descriptions of sex I've ever read--well, listened to. Hush.

That's not to say the other few sex scenes in the novel are riveting; on the contrary, Neil Gaiman seems to desire his children's stories about fantasy monsters featuring characters actually named Shadow Moon to be taken seriously, but sex is approached by someone who I'm not actually sure has ever lost his virginity. Go listen to the languid descriptions of sex in chapter 8 of American Gods and compare it to the mind-shattering "the earth moved" scene from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, or the frantic and passionate tryst between Joe and Joanna from Faulkner's Light in August. Passion isn't merely telling the audience all about the grunting piston-like movements of sex or the act of ejaculation, which Gaiman believes elevates sex. I guess you could just handwave it by saying "They don't make 'em like they used to," but comparing the greats to this trash makes it look even more pitiful.

The novel continues to merely exist at several points, going so far as to drop Shadaloo Bison into a completely detached village suffering horrific winters which literally goes nowhere. It's revisited after the main plot is finished, but it feels completely out of place--as if it were a completely different story dropped in to lengthen the novel. I feel like the publisher demanded a far longer book than Gaiman intended to write; if this is the perfect version of American Gods, I kind of feel ashamed for everyone involved.

The novel ratchets up to a massive war between the gods both old and new, but without spoiling too much (out of respect for you poor, innocent TV viewers) most of the battle is completely off-screen. Oh yeah, did nobody mention that? All the action takes place off-screen and Shadow takes part in none of it. You know, like how Anakin has absolutely no reason to be fighting for Naboo and most of the action takes place without him. He manages to get out of bad situations with seemingly little effort, everyone likes him, his name is literally the kind of thing you'd see scrawled on a binder by an edgy teenager, and he has some sort of God blood or something. I guess it's okay to be a Mary Sue if you're a fantasy protagonist though, because nobody reading fantasy has standards anyway.

Conclusion

I guess this is why I hold fantasy and sci-fi in such low regard: not because I don't personally like the genre, but because critics of the genre seem to accept such low quality garbage and heap glowing praise and awards on the mere act of trying. The bar for entry just keeps shrinking, and by reading these types of novels I feel like I'm lowering myself to the standards typical of the genre--which, after the Young Adultpocalypse of the last decade, is lying somewhere next to dinosaur bones lower than the Mariana Trench. Gaiman has emulated the worst parts of Stephen King, a writer acclaimed for his ability to dump out huge tomes every year quality notwithstanding, and applied it to a plot you'd see in a throwaway anime. Boring, monotone, edgy, unoriginal, cringey (Low-key Lyesmith? How can you read this with a straight face and still respect yourself?) and just generally laughable, American Gods is a book that made me seriously question some of my friends' taste.

Poor