Shadow is soon to be an ex-convict. He has done his time for a botched armed robbery, has kept mostly to himself during those prison years -- and has had no trouble doing so, seeing as he is a hulking mass of a man. It would be wrong to call the man ignorant, though. He whiles away the hours in the slammer reading Herodotus and practicing coin tricks. He is also kept peaceful by his potential future. He can't wait to get back home to his wife, Laura, and work at his friend Robbie's gym. Just piece his life back together, quietly and calmly.

A few days before Shadow is to be officially released, he is summoned to the warden's office. There he finds out that his wife has died in a car crash. Already, his future has irrevocably changed. He is released from prison earlier than he first thought he would be, but the joy is gone. As he flies home and tries his best to stop examining Laura's death like a coin being turned over and over in his hand, his concentration is broken by a man in a pale suit who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. He spooks Shadow by calling him by name, and seems to know the intimate details of both Shadow's and Laura's lives. Wednesday offers Shadow a job as a bodyguard, but Shadow refuses, suitably creeped out by the mysterious man.

He arrives home to find that -- minor spoiler -- not only is Laura dead, but Robbie is, too. It turns out the car crash occurred because Laura was busy performing fellatio on Robbie while they were driving home. Wednesday approaches Shadow again, and Shadow, now dead inside, accepts the job. Wednesday makes Shadow drink three cups of mead -- the warrior's drink -- to seal the deal, and then Shadow gets in a bar fight with a leprechaun. More on that in a moment.

Now, Neil Gaiman chose Shadow as the reader's guide throughout this book, so now would be a good time to stop and examine why. Shadow's personality, to put it bluntly, is next to nonexistent. There's no there there, aside from his coin tricks and a quiet heroism engendered not so much by his curiosity and good nature as much as by his innate ability to go with the flow. In one scene in the book, Shadow recalls Laura telling him that he is not really alive -- he just sort of exists. In one respect, you can't really blame Laura for leaving him in such a messy way. She wanted to experience life in all its extremes, not whitewash the walls of her mind away. In fact, his dead wife still has more of a spark than Shadow alive. The upside of Shadow's passive-aggressive personality is that he is never in danger of upstaging the main focus and outsize personalities of this book -- nothing less than the importance of old and emerging gods in America -- and he has plenty of room in which to develop.

To give away one plot point revealed early in the novel, Wednesday himself is a god from Norse mythology (I will leave which one for you to read about). He is trying to get the old gods on his side to fight a war against the new gods. These old gods, including Bast, Ibis, Easter, Czernobog and "Mad Sweeney" (the leprechaun) are to be enlisted against the shiny new American gods including Technology, Media and Television. Old gods, as you can imagine, take a lot of coaxing. Almost all of them show great distaste for Wednesday, but take an immediate shine toward Shadow. I will leave the reasons why for you to read about.

For those of you who think this book is a mild, laughable premise -- akin to using Herodotus and coin tricks at a cocktail party to keep from betraying your inability at real conversation -- I urge you to reconsider. Gaiman is not a fool. Far from it, he threads his epic yarn with humor, deft intelligence and the ability to ask important questions at the right moment. His imagination seems almost boundless, yet it is firmly delineated by lots and lots of research on these gods, so he can give each one an appropriate personality and really make you understand their sadness at losing believers in this terrifying new land.

This book is also a love letter to America. Gaiman uses real locations with a concreteness of description that shows he actually traveled to these places for his book. Even more tellingly, he has settled down in America after living in England for most of his life, so in a way this is Gaiman's coming out story. Some of the reflections are deeply personal, and quite illuminating. For example, he treats roadside attractions as holy places. (literally, the gods convene there) These are not mere tourist traps, but the end result of an individual's creativity and ingenuity brought out to such an extent that people aggregate at the site. They transfer a little money to get an eyeful of the unique. As Wednesday explains to Shadow, these places would mark the site of temples in earlier days. It's just that America has a different, individualistic way of erecting shrines.

There are two mild complaints I've read in other reviews of this book, and I'd like to clear them up now. No Christian god is represented. The closest Christ comes into the novel is when Wednesday is trying to coax Easter into the fight, and reminds her that people are not really worshipping her when they celebrate Easter anymore. She sadly, tiredly admits to this truth. The reason why Christ is not in here should be obvious. Look to movies like the Passion of the Christ, the way God gets mixed up in talks of abortion, homosexuality and other cultures. Realize that Gaiman's office would have been firebombed if he had Christ trading jokes with Odin. For most of the religious, God and Christ are not entities to be taken lightly. There is an implicit, unspoken pact that you must follow with blind devotion to the point that even a touch of humor, a joke or two at these fellows' expense, would be akin to blasphemy. There is no room for that type of virulence -- so many people champing at the bit to pervert a message of love into a message of bloody vengeance and single-minded ideologies -- in a book like this.

Another complaint deals with the extended sections of the book that take place in Lakeside, Wis. You see, when the new gods get wind of Shadow's involvement, they try to coerce him to their side. When that doesn't work, they try to kill him. Wednesday ships Shadow off to this idyllic little town with a manmade lake and a restaurant that serves pasties for breakfast. (if you've never had a Cornish pasty, do yourself a favor, go to the nearest English pub, and order yourself one with a pint of Guinness -- heaven on earth)

I'm not exactly sure what the complaint is, here. It was obvious to me from the beginning, from all the people parroting that Lakeside is a good little town, that they were worshipping their own little god -- the god of safety and security, and only at the cost of one runaway a year! There's more to it than that, but again, you should read about it for yourself.

A couple of the reviewers on this site, quite bizarrely to me, have boasted that they had read more than 400 pages of American Gods in one night. Maybe that's the problem. They grew antsy at having to stop and revel in little details, when they wanted to jump back to the big picture. I took more than a month to read the book, because I wanted to savor each little piece of it. And Gaiman is a wonder at bringing details to life. Some of my favorites:

For Lakeside itself: There is a raffle each year whereby an old junk car is put in the center of the manmade lake during the winter, then lots are drawn as to when the ice will melt and the car will go under.

For roadside attractions: At the House on the Rock, a deeply unsettling clockwork mechanism shows a drunk leaning against a grave in a churchyard, followed by spectres, flowers, skulls, cats, a strange bird-shape and a priest coming out to look upon him, the priest shaking his head at the drunk in disdain as he reenters the church alone.

At the imagined center of America: A run-down hotel with malfunctioning heating and electricity becomes a neutral ground for the gods on both sides to go to to enact a deal. The gods keep telling Shadow that this is an unstable place, one best to be gotten out of quickly, and Gaiman's writing of graying wallpaper, distant thunder and oppressive atmosphere evokes that perfectly.

At Rock City: Gaiman takes great pleasure in listing the appearances of the gods arriving en masse for battle. Some are human but for goat legs, others are full of tentacles and teeth, some bum cigarettes off of others. All are waiting.

Other wonderful descriptions include haunting tableaux of a majestic gray World Tree in the back country of Virginia, an underworld of black water, branching paths and distant lights, and a "backstage" area that the gods go to which, at one point, is littered with bones and overseen by a strange metal spider in the middle of the Nevada desert.

I could go on to talk about the humble digs some of the gods find themselves in in this modern day -- a walkup in Chicago, a funeral parlor in Illinois, on Indian reservations, or on the street in Los Angeles and San Francisco -- but I'd like to stop here and bring in one more facet of the book that I find engaging. At the end of every chapter, Gaiman breaks from the narrative and includes a story of how a certain god was brought to America, or how they've been surviving it.

One old woman from Scotland, for example, leaves bread and milk out every night for a god from her homeland. As she dies, the god thanks her for her kindnesses. In other stories, a taxi cab driver who is also a genie is freed by a lonely man who takes his place; two twins become slaves and foment rebellions over a long, heartbreaking, wearying time in their own ways; and a goddess becomes a prostitute to have lonely johns worship her to the last. These stories bring depth and multiple threads into the world of the novel, and the world at large. It brings a sense of history, of community, of hope in times of loss (and loss in times of hope). They're a good read, but they are also a spiritual treatise on the importance of belief, of gods needing people as much as people need gods. That you may never realize this is part and parcel of American Gods' magic.

Recommended: Yes