Neil Gaiman

After Neverwhere, this was kind of a disappointment. It seemed more like an exercise in showing off the various gods than anything else. I put it aside for several days in the middle of it, and when I looked back at the first 100+ pages, I thought, wait a sec, what even happened? There wasn’t a single disparate event I could point out, for plot progression. (Although, you know, I could be a bit too old-fashioned, expecting plot.) And why bog Shadow down at the funeral home for what seemed like a year?

I did appreciate, however, how neatly he summed up several details in the end that I was just starting to seriously wonder about — first and most obviously, why Shadow was so important to Wednesday; second, what exactly Shadow was convicted for; and finally, Shadow’s real name. The last was the most subtle — very nicely resolved. The tactic didn’t exasperate me the way the forgettable god did, although it was really the same idea in different forms — one only knows what the character knows.

The forgettable god was exasperating in a good way — I knew it was intended to be annoying, but was still annoyed despite myself. Using the same tactic with his name, however, really fell into place with an audible click. In a way, the forgettable god just set the stage.

In general, however, it was a bit too literary for me — unfocused and depressed (if depressed is the opposite of compressed, though, maybe they’re synonyms… interesting psychological question there), in which wandering characters seek to impress you with how miserable they are. That would be literary works in general, not American Gods  in particular. But the two are too close for my comfort.