Book Review - American Gods

NEIL Gaiman and his work ­certainly deserve the cliched ­idiom "needs no ­introduction".
American Gods, one of his most ambitious novels, is now a TV series, and in turn, the book is being r­epublished 16 years after its first edition.
This version, the definitive ­edition, is, as the author puts it, 12,000 words longer than the v­ersion that won all the awards, and it shows.
American Gods follows a road trip across the US and is gilded with ­mythology, murder ­mystery, romance, and intrigue, with gratuitous bits of sex and violence added as an ­afterthought, all to tell the story that is ­America.
The hero in this ­journey is Shadow, who gets out of prison early for good behaviour, only to find the home he was going back to is now empty.
Shadow meets Mr Wednesday, who offers him a job, and slowly introduces him to a world where gods who were brought to the US by immigrants walk among the people who worship them.
The book reads as if it was ­written for the writer's pleasure, not the reader's. Between the pages are interesting descriptors, nuggets of facts, bits of tension, and fantastic worlds, with ­nudity and disturbing scenes obviously ­designed to string the reader along.
Even for fans of Gaiman, this book is divisive.
That is not to say that American Gods is not a fun read. I often stop to do research every time a new god or bits of mythology is ­introduced.
Representatives from Hindu, Norse, Egyptian, and Slavic pantheons, and more are all here, along with some new ones conceived by modern times.