American Gods

And there it is again. Do American publishers worry a lot
that readers will mistake a novel for, say, a boa
constrictor?

Shadow is looking forward to getting out of prison, seeing his wife, getting his life back. The news that Laura is dead hits him hard; the news that she died in flagrante along with the friend who was going to give him a job is devastating. There seems little to do except take up the offer of employment given him by the mysterious Mr Wednesday. This job leads him on a journey that falls somewhere between a spirit quest and a road movie, to rally the old gods brought to America by generations of immigrants for a final battle with the new gods of technology. America is a bad country for gods, and there isn't enough to go around.

"Wednesday grinned. His smiles were strange things, Shadow decided. They contained no shred of humor, no happiness, no mirth. Wednesday looked like he had learned to smile from a manual."
Aptly enough, Neil Gaiman's biography of the American soul dances among the great American genres: Part beat novel, part noir, part war story, part sting, it defies even the many layered label of magic realism. It is what it is and that's probably all you can say without an essay. It's a big ass, slow moving read, but none the worse for it, and it is absolutely full of beautiful prose moments that thumb their noses at any snide presumptions as to the quality of fantasy writing. The story is rambling, its turns deducible, but not predictable. At its heart, it is a series of vignettes in which Shadow meets gods who tell tales of how it used to be, and of tales of the many migrations that made up modern America.

In the audiobook, Neil Gaiman reads the 'Coming to America' interludes - plus a foreword and an afterword - while George Guidall, an Audible favourite, reads the main narration, but the character voices are read by separate actors, which is something that I always like in an audiobook. The performances are all good, although there is always something a little odd in the juxtaposition of Audible's preferred dry, measured style and scenes of sex and violence, the narrator describing the crunch of bone or a post-coital ecstasy with the same impassive tones he used to describe the dented paintwork of a car or the window of a diner.

Pines

Hello tie-in cover!

Ethan Burke, Gulf War veteran and Secret Service agent wakes on the road into the small town of Wayward Pines, Idaho, with no wallet or ID. He dimly recalls an accident, a truck hitting his car and killing his partner. He remembers that he was looking for two other missing agents. And he can not get out of Wayward Pines, a town which seems too perfect to be true.

Pines is the first book in the Wayward Pines trilogy (now adapted as a 'major television event' as the tie in cover informs me excitedly) and lays out a surprising number of its cards by the end of its relatively short length: What the deal with the town is, who is behind it; all revealed by the final page, so the following books are presumably going to be very different, and it's kind of a shame. Pines is a deliberate tribute to Twin Peaks, and although more SF at heart, has a vein of almost Lovecraftian horror running through it, with its road that leads back on itself, the eerie perfection of the town and its brutal and macabre immune response.

It's on the level of weird fiction that Pines works best, and the high concept but ultimately mundane reveal at the end was actually a slight disappointment, for me at least. That said, I think there's enough potential to look into the other books in the series, but I'm going to miss the weirdness.