Contemporary Urban

American Gods by Neil Gaiman reads like a schizophrenic’s dream. I really tried to like the concepts explored within the book but found its pedantic nature overwhelming and brutally nauseating. I went in with high hopes for this book and left feeling confused and underwhelmed. The banality of the story just digs into your patience and you wonder if you should even keep going. The story feels like a long drive and you are waiting and waiting for things to get interesting as the journey continues but the high points are few and far between a sea of monotony. While Gaiman’s writing has a certain humor to it that can carry a lot of the weight, American God’s feels akin to stale bread when compared to sweet and fantastical Coraline. By forcing the mythos into the modern world Gaiman works hard to remove what made the fantastical fantastic. Odin (“Wednesday”) performs parlor magic in a bar, robs a bank by conning people into handing him their money. The most potent magic, or “godly” power is Shadow’s revival towards the end of the tale. The missing pieces of mythology such as the creation stories and the potent magical artifcats really drag down the “americanized” gods.

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