Review of American Gods
by Emily Stewart

Neil Gaiman is probably best known locally for his graphic novels such as the Sandman series and as a Guest Of Honor at CONvergence 2000.

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. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.

Without individuals, we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people, but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

I remember reading somewhere that a writer's objective should be that the main character or characters are in some way changed by the end of the story. They figure something out, work through a problem or learn something about their own motivations. In my opinion, really good writing changes the reader by the end of the story. Fiction is often defined in Sci-Fi fan dogma as an escape, a way to avoid external pressure. Neil Gaiman, along with many other authors in the genre, has the incredible ability to affect his reader and use the escape of fiction to expand his reader's outlook.

Centered around the idea that gods travel with their believers, American Gods paints a picture of a U.S. landscape littered with deities brought over by immigrants over thousands of years. The central character Shadow Moon travels through the United States' landscape with a mysterious employer who goes by the name of Wednesday. Shadow begins the story as an imprisoned convict near the end of his sentence. Two books that he has managed to sneak out of the prison library define who he is and will become through the story. One book is a how to on sleight of hand tricks, the other Herodotus' Histories, which includes mythology of the ancient world. Shadow becomes adept at his coin tricks and his skill at diverting attention remains with him through the story as he travels. Mythology diverts his own attention as he pursues what he is and want to be.

The story is even better than could reasonably be expected from a such a talented writer. Very cerebral and engaging, and very thrilling. The characters were deliberately cryptic but, by the end, still very well defined in terms of actions and motivation. The best analogy I can make is of a picture puzzle. Dump out the box and figure out the story as the pieces fit together. When it's all done, the pieces fit together as they were clearly intended to.