In American Gods, a man named Shadow is released from prison when his wife dies in a car accident. On his journey to the funeral, he meets a mysterious stranger, Mr Wednesday. Wednesday turns out to be the Norse god, Odin, and hires Shadow as a bodyguard. Wednesday tells Shadow that war is coming, a war between the "old" gods, and the "new." These old gods are the gods of myth and legend, who have come to the United States, brought in the imaginations, memories, and stories of immigrants from all nations. The new gods are the gods of new technology and urban society: Town, Road, Media, and Technology. This symbolises a division between the beliefs of old, religious, and agrarian societies, and new, modern, urban, and technological societies. Wednesday tells Shadow that as people believe in the new, they move away from the old. A god who is no longer believed in dies a particularly final death.
Wednesday travels around the country gathering the old gods, to prepare for battle. Shadow accompanies him for most of this, meeting gods such as the German Eostre, goddess of the dawn, in San Francisco; Bulgarian Chernebog and the Zorya sisters (Morning Star, Evening Star, and Midnight Star) living in Chicago. Anansi, the African spider-trickster god appears as "Mr Nancy." "Mad Sweeney" is an Irish Leprechaun. Mr Ibis and Jaquel are Thoth and Anubis, running a funeral parlor in Cairo, Illinois.
It emerges that Wednesday has planned an elaborate con. His power is fading as Americans gradually lose their memories of, and their faith in, the old gods. As a god who gains power from battle, he is orchestrating a battle between the new and the old, with the help of Low-Key Lyesmith (Loki, the Norse god of mischief and trickery). Shadow realises this at the end of the book after he has performed an act of major sacrifice, re-enacting Odin’s time hanging from the "World Tree," pierced by a spear.
Accompanying Shadow from time to time, is his dead wife, Laura. She has died in a car crash while performing a sex act with his friend, and Shadow struggles with his anger and betrayal. But Laura saves Shadow, killing the various new gods and their henchmen, and enabling Shadow to see through the trickery of Wednesday and Low-Key. It is an Orpheus and Eurydice in reverse, in which the dead wife saves the living husband. Laura is a form of the undead, brought out of the grave by a magic coin, which Shadow has thrown into her grave.
Gods from the classical pantheon are generally absent from American Gods, though echoes of classicism appear throughout, in the classical columns that dot the architecture of the mid-west, in some of the place-names, and in the occasional reference. For the most part, however, Gaiman draws on less familiar Pagan gods, such as Czernebog and Eostre. A long subplot has Shadow spending time in a quiet Great Lakes town of "Lakeside," an idyllic place which, it emerges, is idyllic only because of the manipulations of a Hungarian "Kobbold," a pagan deity who protects the town in exchange for the annual sacrifice of a child.
Inset stories, partly "written" by Mr Ibis, detail the lives of other ‘American’ gods, which have come to the country in the stories of immigrants: in California Bilquis, the Queen of Sheba, masquerading as a prostitute, devours men through her vagina; in New York an immigrant from Oman meets a taxi-driving Ifrit, a form of Arabian Djinn; in Virginia, a convict woman brings pixies and fairies with her from Cornwall; and the slaves from Africa and the Caribbean bring tribal gods with them to the South.
American Gods is an example of a post-modern pastiche, in which multiple storylines and mythical intertexts operate. Its central figure, Shadow, turns out to be Wednesday’s son, and therefore himself possibly a figure of Odin. In an epilogue, Shadow visits Iceland and meets the real Odin, giving him the American Odin’s glass eye as a keepsake. Its central question is about the nature of belief: on the one hand, Gaiman taps into a mythology of power that is a recurring feature in his work. On the other, the panoply of gods from beliefs around the world seems more like a collector’s guide to mythology, and less representative of real power.
