I have to confess, science fiction/fantasy/allegorical novels don't really trip my trigger. The few books of these genres that I love (ie: Harry Potter and the Southern Vampire Series), I love because of the author's captivating storytelling, which is also what hooked me on Neil Gaman's American Gods.
We enter the story with Shadow, who's about to leave prison after serving a three-year sentence for assaulting his cohorts in a bank robbery. His outlook is bleak ("He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.") but he gets through the days by creating rituals to impose some order on his small existence. Shadow makes lists of what he'll do when he's free again, practices coin tricks and searches for meaning in weather changes. Throughout the novel, he'll continue this gravitation toward ritual, illustrating Gaiman's point that we lost too much when we left behind the gods and religion of our ancestors; man needs ritual to feel alive.
No one is this book is alive. Shadow's wife, Laura, dies the day of his release from prison in a car accident while fellating his best friend. She spends the duration of the book as a corpse or ghost (Gaiman is never quite clear on this point), popping in and out of Shadow's life to remind him of how much he misses her and supply the object of his quest: to either bring her back to life or give her a restful death. Laura points out that Shadow isn't alive either, despite the heart beating in his chest ("You're like this big, solid, man-shaped hole in the world").
I enjoy Gaiman's characterization of Shadow: a man seeking something sacred in a world full of profanity (Gaiman's America is gray, cold, and full of foul odors). He meticulously studies the board meeting minutes of the small town where he moves after his release, desperately seeking a heritage not his own, some sense of continuity to life. He tries (and often fails) to build relationships with the people around in the hopes of forming a human connection.
From there, though, Gaimain veers into a thinly veiled religious allegory. There are two camps of fantastical characters: the old gods and the new. Shadow is enlisted into the camp of the old gods: Odin, a leprechaun named Mad Sweeney, an Eastern European god called Czernobog and Egyptian deities like Bast and Horus. The power of these old gods is waning as they teeter on the brink of obsolescence because people don't believe in them anymore and gods can only exist in the hearts of the faithful. Instead, Americans are "clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon." Odin wants to confront the new gods before he and his fellows are obliterated; he and Shadow, harried by agents of the new gods, travel across America, seeking out the old gods and asking for their aid.
Odin is slain in battle and Shadow is committed to conducting his vigil. This means -- wait for it -- hanging from a crucifix. And get this: he develops a bleeding wound in his side! I get it; Shadow is the messiah come to return the ancient gods to their rightful place in the heart of these faithless Americans, whose lives are literally shit (Gaiman seems to really like describing feces, since there's plenty of it in this book) without a sense of religion and ritual. I think there's something to this point -- religion is a binding force in society and human beings crave some degree of ritual to center their lives and give them a sense of purpose, whether it be going to church or the gym -- I just wish Gaiman could get to it quicker and not shove it down my throat so much.
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