AMERICAN GODS/Neil Gaiman (2015)

They scheme.  They burp.  They go from ratchety, to ornery, to coy.  Gaiman’s gods live among us, in Retirement Hell for Old World Gods.  Like everyone who’s old in America, the gods are washed up and unwanted.  

He dumps a whole cosmology on us.  They come in a wonderful, bewildering range.  Mad Sweeney is a leprechaun.  Cznerobog, the Slavic Black God, appears as a thick-muscled Diablo, ready to butcher anything for pleasure, human or animal, but still a decent dude.  And there are some human interfaces, like Mama Zouzou, the Voudon priestess, who passes on ritual, not magic.  Once you accept the premise that they’re all real you simply let their machinations and blind conniving wash right over you. 

That’s all standard-issue fantasy fare.  A bit of magic here, some flashbacks there, and you’ve got a few hundred pages.  You get creatures, not human but  .  You get colorful flourishes and quaint gestures, fife and drums, wizardry.  But after a while I feel battered.  It comes to feel like an action-packed adventure movie with a threadbare plot.  And that’s where I want to disembark.

Gaiman manages to hold off from what must have been a strong urge to go whole-hog.  I mean, a full-page spread.  Bam!  Splash!  Kazoom!  The battle of the titans, Armageddon of the Gods.  He could have gone there, but he doesn’t.  Instead he weaves in plot elements, most of moderate interest, but functional, and he weaves in something even better—the real magic, the American Midwest.

The Midwest is the real haunting presence here.  It is ever-present, a mute backdrop of hard-core Americana, the America of motels and diners, smelly brownstones in Chicago and, best of all, those off-kilter tourist traps that sprout along the highways.  Who knew these tacky joints are all built on sacred sites?  Who would have guessed their basements house the invisible architecture holding up everything?  Who knew they are windows into parallel worlds?  Only the gods, of course.  

We discover all this through the eyes of Shadow.  OK, corny name.  But he’s a big lug of a guy, good-hearted and loyal to a fault, even after death, and his slow-witted sense-making serves to tie it all together.  To a point.  Actually the plot is still thin.  It’s more the idea of the gods being present that attracts us all.  It’s all about enchanting our disenchanted landscape.  That’s a powerful-enough vehicle to propel anyone through a 750-page paperback.