American Gods

In his dreams, Shadow sees a child being raised alone “long ago and far away” (173). The child is sacrificed to an unnamed god. Shadow wakes up and remembers the terrible state of his life. Stepping out of his small apartment, he feels the biting cold. Though he is almost freezing, he must go into town to purchase supplies. A police car stops at the side of the road to offer him a lift. Inside is Chad Mulligan, a local officer, who refuses to let Shadow be “real stupid” and walk in the cold. Chad takes Shadow across the town, and they have breakfast, buy warm clothes, and find a car for Shadow to drive. After returning to his apartment, Shadow is visited by Richie Hinzelmann. Hinzelmann brings a welcome basket of local food and tells Shadow an outlandish story. He also mentions the kids who become “stir-crazy” during the long winter months and run away from home. According to Hinzelmann, television is to blame.

After several days, Wednesday visits Shadow. He takes Shadow to Las Vegas to see a man. Each time Shadow tries to remember the man’s name, however, the name is “gone” from his mind. Away from Shadow, a man in a grey suit with an unremarkable face works in the vault beneath a casino. No one notices the man except a large man in a lighter grey suit. The second man follows the first man to the hotel bar late at night, and they talk. The man in the light suit (implied to be Wednesday) apologizes to the man in the dark suit for events in Wisconsin and tries to recruit him for his cause. The game may be crooked, he says, but “it’s the only game in town” (188). When the man in the light suit leaves without paying his waitress, the forgettable man in the dark suit takes pity on her. He advises her that a nearby customer is about to win big and will need help spending his winnings. The waitress immediately forgets the man but finds the winning customer, nevertheless.

Shadow and Wednesday return to Lakeside. Wednesday recruited the forgettable man to his cause with a bottle of Soma, a special drink made from “concentrated prayer and belief” (189). Shadow informs Wednesday of Laura’s desire to live. Though he knows spells that brought him back to life when he was hanging from the world tree, Wednesday says that Laura cannot return from the dead. He says that she is not as “dead as she ought to be” (191). Shadow tells Wednesday about Sweeney’s coin. Wednesday refers to thunderbirds and eagle stones and insists that Shadow return to the apartment in Lakeside. For the first time, Wednesday seems vulnerable. After, Shadow regrets that he did not try to comfort Wednesday. He wonders if there will be consequences for his inaction.

Richie takes Shadow to the Lakeside video store. Shadow, as promised, buys raffle tickets from Richie for a local competition. Each year, a broken down car — called a “klunker”—is pushed out onto the frozen lake, and the townspeople gamble on when the ice will thaw enough for the car to fall through. Each raffle ticket equals a five-minute window of time. Whoever has the correct time wins $1,000 while the rest of the money raised is donated to charity. Shadow picks a block of time on March 23. After the video store, Shadow visits the library to research thunderbirds and eagle stones. Though he finds nothing about eagle stones, he learns that thunderbirds are figures from certain parts of Indigenous American folklore that can bring thunder forth by flapping their wings. Shadow borrows several books, one of which contains the local council minutes from 1872-1884. After, he talks to Chad Mulligan. They discuss Marguerite Olsen, whose ex-husband allegedly kidnapped one of their children, and Shadow realizes that Chad is in love with Marguerite.

Shadow’s strange dreams resume. He tries to ask the figures in his dreams about thunderbirds. Unable to get an answer, he clambers up a pyramid of skulls while black birds circle above him. At the top, the man with the buffalo head tells him that the skulls belonged to him. A plummeting bird topples Shadow from the heap, and he is woken up by a ringing phone. Wednesday is calling: Everybody knows about Shadow’s dream somehow. Wednesday is furious and tells Shadow to find him in San Francisco. Shadow travels to San Francisco, where Wednesday is so angry that he refuses to speak to him. There, they meet Easter in a park. Wednesday is surprised that Easter is willing to leave the picnic in the park; Easter is not as desperate as the other old gods, though Wednesday insists that she is just as much in danger of being forgotten. Though people celebrate Easter, they do not know anything about Easter’s original identity: “Eostre of the Dawn” (204). When Easter gets riled, however, Wednesday is sheepish. With his encouragement, Easter agrees to join his side.

When Wednesday underpays a waitress, Shadow tries to compensate her, and Wednesday is annoyed. On the way to the airport, they argue. Wednesday insists that the waitress was not a good person, listing her many “sins.” He complains about the scarcity of sacrifices in the modern day and how he is left with no belief or worship to sustain him. The humans, he complains, made him, and now they have forgotten him, so he takes a little back from them for himself.

In Lakeside, Chad visits Shadow to tell him that one of the girls he overheard on the bus to the town has gone missing. Her name is Alison McGovern. Chad questions Shadow about his whereabouts, and when he is satisfied, he invites Shadow to join the “hunting party” to search for Alison. The search turns up nothing. On the way home, Shadow stops at a store. The girl behind the counter is Alison’s friend, Sophie, who was also on the bus. She is upset and wants to leave Lakeside, explaining that other young people have gone missing in the past. The adults make excuses for these regular disappearances, but Sophie does not believe them.

In another Coming to America interlude, 12-year-old twins named Wututu and Agasu are captured in Africa in 1778. They are placed on a Dutch ship with hundreds of other captured Africans and transported to the Americas to be enslaved. Growing up, Agasu is separated from his sister and given many different names. When night falls, he sneaks into the woods to pray with his fellow enslaved people. They have brought their own gods from their homelands and try to keep these gods alive. Agasu dies in the “slave revolt of 1791” (215) in St. Domingue, while Wututu is renamed Sukey and sent to New Orleans. She becomes a voodoo practitioner named Mama Zouzou. Though they have not seen one another in many years, she still feels a connection to her twin brother. She feels his pain from hundreds of miles away. In 1821, a free woman named Widow Paris visits Wututu. Reluctantly, Wututu teaches Widow Paris about voodoo but she believes that the younger woman has “no interest in the gods of the distant land” (218). Even though he is dead, Wututu continues to feel her brother’s presence and feels that she will be with him soon.

Shadow drives Wednesday to South Dakota in a “lumbering and ancient” (221) Winnebago. They are stopped by a roadblock until Wednesday draws runes on the Winnebago’s dashboard, then tells Shadow to take the vehicle off-road. Shadow does so, and the vehicle nearly tips over. Before it does, they plunge into a dark, empty world under a star-filled sky. In the distance, Shadow sees a giant “mechanical spider” at the base of a hill. The ground is covered in bones; when Shadow touches a bone, he finds himself inside Mr. Town’s head. Mr. Town is leading a search to capture Wednesday and Shadow, and he speaks to Mr. World, whose “urbane” voice is familiar. Wednesday frees Shadow from the bone, and they continue across the barren landscape. This place, Wednesday explains is “behind the scenes” (226). They hike across the tough landscape, and Wednesday’s clothes seem to change.

Eventually, Wednesday and Shadow reach a mobile home. It belongs to an Indigenous American man named Whiskey Jack, who is inside with a white man named John Chapman (also known as Apple Johnny). Neither man wants to join Wednesday’s cause because they believe the old gods have already lost. Whiskey Jack has no interest in fighting for another losing side, while Chapman blames Paul Bunyan for encroaching on his “head space.” Whiskey Jack tells the story of Fox and Wolf; Wolf rules the land of the dead, and Fox mourns the loss of his friend. Shadow speaks to the men about thunderbirds, which Chapman says still live in West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. In a spiritual moment, Whiskey Jack tells Shadow that the thunderbirds may help him bring Laura back. After talking about the man with the buffalo head, Whiskey Jack asks Shadow to return when he has found his “tribe.”

Harry Bluejay, Jack’s nephew, owns a 1981 Buick that he agrees to swap for the Winnebago. Wednesday, Shadow, and Chapman hitch a ride to meet him in the rec hall of a nearby reservation. There, he insists that he is not Jack’s nephew, but Wednesday’s ominous words compel Harry to follow through with the trade. While resuming the drive to Minnesota, Wednesday broods. Shadow learns that they spent almost a month backstage, even though only a few days seem to have passed. Wednesday complains about the men’s stories, none of which are apparently true. He insists that legends are important to a country even if the “legends don’t believe it anymore” (234).

When in Lakeside, Shadow takes long walks by himself to drive away his painful thoughts about “Laura, or the strange dreams, or the things that were not and could not be” (236). Occasionally, he takes trips with Wednesday to recruit gods. One day, he meets Laura in a “tiny graveyard.” Though she has been trying to monitor him, something about Lakeside makes it difficult for her to find him. This time, however, something is different. They talk, and Laura says that, like her, Shadow is not really alive. He is a “man-shaped hole in the world” (240). Robbie, on the other hand, felt alive to her. Laura plans to head south, and she will see Shadow eventually because their journeys aren’t over.

In an interlude, the war between old and new gods has already begun. Traffic accidents, violent deaths, grave desecrations, and strange weather interfere with the lives of gods. Bilquis struggles to find clients. A white limousine pulls up on the street in front of her. Technical Boy is the new god inside, though Bilquis does not know him, and she gets into the car assuming that he is a client. He uses her real name, and in surprise, Bilquis “half-jumps, half-falls out” (244) of the limo. She tries to get away, but the car runs her over repeatedly. In another interlude, Samantha Black Crow speaks to Marguerite Olsen, her half-sister. They discuss Marguerite’s new neighbor (Shadow), and Sam knows that Alison’s disappearance has had a negative effect on Marguerite. She arranges to visit the following day. In a final interlude, Laura takes a job as a gas station night shift worker in Florida. Her boss refers to the night shift as the “zombie shift.”