American Gods (Tenth Anniversary Edition)

512 Pages·2016·2.07 MB·English

by  Gaiman Neil

Photograph © by Stephanie Berg/Dreamstime.com
American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition
Author’s Preferred Text
Neil Gaiman
Dedication
—
FOR ABSENT FRIENDS
Kathy Acker and
Roger Zelazny,
and all points between
Contents
Dedication
An Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition
A Note on the Text
Caveat, and Warning for Travelers
Epigraph
Part One
Shadows
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part Two
My Ainsel
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part Three
The Moment of the Storm
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Part Four
Epilogue: Something That the Dead Are Keeping Back
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Postscript
Acknowledgments
Appendix
An Interview with Neil Gaiman
Reading Group Discussion Questions
How Dare You?
Other Books by Neil Gaiman
Copyright
About the Publisher
An Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition
I don’t know what it’s like to read this book. I only know what it was like to live
the writing of it.
I moved to America in 1992. Something started, in the back of my
head. There were unrelated ideas that I knew were important and yet seemed
unconnected: two men meeting on a plane; the car on the ice; the significance of
coin tricks; and more than anything, America: this strange, huge place where I
now found myself living that I knew I didn’t understand. But I wanted to
understand it. More than that, I wanted to describe it.
And then, during a stopover in Iceland I stared at a tourist diorama
of the travels of Leif Erickson, and it all came together. I wrote a letter to my
agent and my editor that explained what the book would be. I wrote “American
Gods” at the top of the letter, certain I could come up with a better title.
A couple of weeks later, my editor sent me a mock-up of the book
cover. It showed a road, and a lightning strike, and, at the top, it said, “American
Gods.” It seemed to be the cover of the book I had planned to write.
I found it both off-putting and exhilarating to have the cover before
the book. I put it up on the wall and looked at it, intimidated, all thoughts of ever
finding another title gone forever. This was the book cover. This was the book.
Now I just had to write it.
I wrote the first chapter on a train journey from Chicago to San
Diego. And I kept traveling, and I kept writing. I drove from Minneapolis to
Florida by back roads, following routes I thought Shadow would take in the
book. I wrote, and sometimes, when I was stuck, I hit the road. I ate pasties in
the Upper Peninsula and hush puppies in Cairo. I did my best not to write about
any place I had not been.
I wrote my book in many places—houses in Florida, and in a cabin
on a Wisconsin lake, and in a hotel room in Las Vegas.
I would follow Shadow on his journey, and when I did not know
what happened to Shadow I would write a Coming to America story, and by the
time I got to the end of that I would know what Shadow was doing, and so
would return to him. I wanted to write two thousand words a day, and if I wrote a
thousand words a day I was happy.
I remember when it was all done in first draft telling Gene Wolfe,
who is the wisest writer I know and has written more excellent novels than any
man I’ve met, that I thought I had now learned how to write a novel. Gene
looked at me, and smiled kindly. “You never learn how to write a novel,” he told
me. “You only learn to write the novel you’re on.”
He was right. I’d learned to write the novel I was writing, and
nothing more. Still, it was a fine, strange novel to have learned how to write. I
was always aware of how very far short it fell of the beautiful, golden, gleaming,
perfect book I had in my head, but even so, it made me happy.
I grew a beard and I did not cut my hair while I was writing this
book, and many people thought I was a trifle odd (although not the Swedes, who
approved and told me that a king of theirs had done something very similar, only
not with a novel). I shaved the beard off at the end of the first draft, and disposed
of the unfeasibly long hair shortly after that.
The second draft was mostly a process of excavation and
clarification. Moments that needed to grow grew and moments that needed to be
shorter were trimmed.
I wanted it to be a number of things. I wanted to write a book that
was big and odd and meandering, and I did and it was. I wanted to write a book
that included all the parts of America that obsessed and delighted me, which
tended to be the bits that never showed up in the films and television shows.
I finished it, eventually, and I handed it in, taking a certain amount
of comfort in the old saying that a novel can best be defined as a long piece of
prose with something wrong with it, and I was fairly sure that I’d written one of
those.
My editor was concerned that the book I had given to her was
slightly too big and too meandering (she didn’t mind it being too odd), and she
wanted me to trim it, and I did. I suspect her instincts may have been right, for
the book was certainly successful—it sold many copies, and it was fortunate
enough to receive a number of awards, including the Nebula and the Hugo (for,