AMERICAN GODS

Disturbing, gripping and profoundly strange, Gaiman's epic novel sees him on the road to the heart of America. The special 10th Anniversary version of the book includes extended chapters and materials eliminated from the first publication, as well as related essays and interviews.

After three years in prison, Shadow has done his time. But as the time until his release ticks away, he can feel a storm brewing. Two days before he gets out, his wife Laura dies in a mysterious car crash, in adulterous circumstances. Dazed, Shadow travels home, only to encounter the bizarre Mr Wednesday claiming to be a refugee from a distant war, a former god and the king of America. Together they embark on a very strange journey across the States, along the way solving the murders which have occurred every winter in one small American town. But the storm is about to break...

A TV adaptation of the book is currently in development. Find out more.

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About Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman was born in England but now lives in Minnesota, in a big house of uncertain location where he accumulates computers and cats.

Reviews

• ‘AMERICAN GODS is some kind of miracle. Neil Gaiman has managed to tell the tallest of tales in the most heart rending and believable fashion, despite the story's truly mythic scale. It is an important, essential book. As Pablo Neruda once said of another world class novel, not to read it is the same as never having tasted an orange’ - Jonathan Carroll

• ‘From his first collection of short stories, Neil Gaiman has always been a remarkable, remarkably gifted writer, but AMERICAN GODS is the first of his fictions to match, even surpass, the breathtaking imaginative sweep and suggestiveness of his classic SANDMAN series of graphic novels. Here we have poignancy, terror, nobility, magic, sacrifice, wisdom, mystery, heartbreak, and a hard-earned sense of resolution - a real emotional richness and grandeur that emerge from masterful storytelling’ - Peter Straub
  
  
• Neil Gaiman, a writer of rare perception and endless imagination, has long been an English treasure; and is now an American treasure as well’ - William Gibson
  
  
• ‘Fantasy fans are about to discover something that comic book readers have known for years -- there's no one quite like Neil Gaiman. AMERICAN GODS is Gaiman at the top of his game, original, engrossing, and endlessly inventive, a picaresque journey across America where the travellers are even stranger than the roadside attractions’ - George R R Martin
  
  
• ‘You long for writers like Neil Gaiman, his vision is so personal and idiosyncratic. And unexpected, like the writer himself. An Englishman living in America, he explores the contradictions with a light all his own’ - Chris Carter, creator of The X Files

 

 

Extract

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 him, because the man had got him. He did not awake in prison with a feeling of dread; 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 got 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 utter 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 cell-mate.

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 – bang, the worst has happened. You get a few days for it to sink in, then you're riding the cart on your way to do the dance on nothing.'

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

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

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