Neil Gaiman
This is the first novel by Gaiman that I have read. It was a bit of false advertising (or at least false expectations). The jacket cover promises a "journey...across American landscape" and in the forward, Gaiman suggests that the descriptions of this American landscape will be so familiar that we will try to drive and find the places he writes about. I felt no such urge. Perhaps I have not spent enough time in the Midwest to be the target audience, but I found the locations to be generic and rather flat.
What is did love about this novel was the description (and implicit commentary) of the gods. Gaiman describes a mythological landscape that pits the "old world gods" of greek, norse, roman, african, asian origin against the "new world gods" of money, technology, tv, sex, etc. He describes how the old gods arrived in America based on the belief of the people coming. If someone believes in and/or worships a god, that god comes into existence in this new land. The story of this conflict is told with a character named Shadow as the protagonist. He is an ex-con who has been drawn into the god conflict, and follows along with all the crazy idea and thinking that is presented to him. In the end, we realize that not only is this a mythological exercise, it is also a mystery novel. Quite fun.
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