American Gods

I like Neil Gaiman. I like what he says in interviews. I like the way he champions little-known or forgotten writers. I like the way he stands up for books. I just wish I could enjoy the books he writes.

No, that’s not quite right. I love the creepy opening of Coraline. I like the way Stardust upends fairy tale conventions. And I was hooked by the first hundred pages or so of American Gods. But to me they all come across as great ideas never brought to fruition.

All the time I was reading AG, I kept thinking it was building up to be something truly memorable. There are interesting characters, memorable settings, and an atmosphere of menace that has you looking up from the page to make sure there really is nothing in the corner of the room.

And yet, when the climax arrives, the battle between gods old and new… the writing slows down while the pages pile up and if anything happens, it’s either so vaguely described you can’t be sure about what did take place, or it’s stretched out to pages when a paragraph or two would have worked so much better.

To me, at least the last quarter of this massive book – which includes an extra 12,000 words Gaiman cut out for its first publication – reads as though he sat down to work each day and banged out the pages until he was finished. Then he went back, tidied them up a little and let them go. He didn’t cut. He didn’t edit or polish. Just got the pages down and said That’s it. I’m done.

But it/was a bestseller, so what do I know?