American Gods (2001)
American Gods is a 2001 science fiction book written by Neil Gaiman.
Released from prison into a country that has quietly gone strange, an ex-convict named Shadow takes a job as bodyguard to the con man Mr. Wednesday. Their road trip becomes a recruiting drive: the old gods that immigrants carried to America, now fading and broke, are being pushed aside by new deities of media, technology, and money. Neil Gaiman routes Norse myth, roadside attractions, and diner small talk into a single strange map of belief. The result reads as part fantasy, part crime story, part travelogue through the parts of America the interstate skips.
Quick answers
What is American Gods about?
Released from prison into a country that has quietly gone strange, an ex-convict named Shadow takes a job as bodyguard to the con man Mr. Wednesday. Their road trip becomes a recruiting drive: the old gods that immigrants carried to America, now fading and broke, are being pushed aside by new deities of media, technology, and money. Neil Gaiman routes Norse myth, roadside attractions, and diner small talk into a single strange map of belief. The result reads as part fantasy, part crime story, part travelogue through the parts of America the interstate skips.
When was American Gods published?
American Gods was published in 2001.
Who made American Gods?
American Gods was written by Neil Gaiman.
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A few thoughts on American Gods
God of War treats the old myths the same way, as tired and dangerous beings with families and grudges rather than statues. The Starz series American Gods brings Shadow and Wednesday to the screen with the book's dreamlike menace intact. Supernatural runs a lighter version of the same idea, two men on an endless American highway meeting gods at the gas station.
Old gods drifting through a country that stopped believing in them
Shadow's road trip with Mr. Wednesday reveals immigrant gods reduced to con men and diner regulars, forgotten by the country that once worshipped them. God of War, Stargate SG-1, Supernatural, Smallville and Slay the Gods all strand old or godlike power inside ordinary lives and small towns, diminished but never quite finished.
Epic scores and concept albums built from myth and legend
Gaiman routes Norse gods and roadside Americana into one strange map of belief, and these records aim for that same mythic register. The Return of the King soundtrack, In the Court of the Crimson King, IX Equilibrium, Universal Migrator and Painkiller all reach for grand, legend-sized sound, treating old myth as something still worth the drama.
Modern powers like technology and ideology playing the role of new gods
American Gods pits fading deities against the newer gods of media and machinery, a fight the old ones are clearly losing. The Matrix, Portal 2, Half-Life 2 and BioShock imagine that same shift taken further, systems, corporations and code holding more real authority over people than any figure once called divine.