While we were away for the weekend, I finished reading the newest edition of an old favorite. For those unaware, Neil Gaiman's American Gods has a new Annotated edition, with notes added in to the Author's Preferred Text added by one Leslie S. Klinger.
While the plot remains the same as it did 20 year ago, the annotations add more details to the text in places. Sometimes. We'll return to this here in a bit.
So, we open on Shadow Moon finishing up his last week in an unidentified prison, waiting out his last week to return to his wife Laura. He gets called into the Warden's office, and informed he's getting released early because his wife is deceased. Thankfully, transportation had been arranged prior to his early release, so Shadow is able to switch around airline tickets to get back to Eagle Point, assumed to be somewhere in Northern Indiana. (While there are real locations used in the text, a few, like Eagle Point are very vaguely defined as to where they actually are as they don't exist.) On Shadow's last flight, he gets bumped to First Class, where he winds up sitting next to Mr. Wednesday, who offers him a job, given the job he's supposed to be returning to doesn't exist. Shadow ignores this at first, until Wednesday provides proof his would be employer died in the same car crash that killed Laura.
Needless to say, Shadow does eventually take Wednesday up on the job offer, but not before dealing with Laura's funeral and getting a gold coin from Mad Sweeney, the Leprechaun. The coin has a weird property that brings Laura back to an intelligent zombie like life after Shadow drops it in her casket.
To skip ahead a bit, we soon find out Wednesday is really Odin, and just about everyone Shadow meets and interacts with in the novel winds up being an American incarnation of a deity or folk tale from outside the US. Except the New Gods, who represent ideas important in the US, like Media (with whom the opportunity to match up with Medea is sadly never realized), Technology, Television, and MIB.
Wednesday is trying to line the old gods up for an upcoming war and winds up dead because of it. Shadow has his own issues, as he moves from Cairo, Illinois to Lakeside, Wisconsin with several trips between before the biggest scenes in Virginia and Rock City, Tennessee.
Between chapters, we get pictures of the arrival/and or mostly unrelated modern lives of foreign gods and creatures on US soil. The chapter involving the Irfrit/Djinn still has the ability to make me cry, as does the one concerning the slave trade.
It's a magnificent read from start to finish, filled with memorable characters and interludes discussing arrivals in America. It also introduces the biggest scene stealer ever, Anansi, who's children fill up another volume down the road.
As for the annotations... These were somewhat of a welcome addition to the text, since they were nowhere near as obnoxious as the are in, say, House of Leaves. and generally informative when they weren't mentioning that "This Passage/sentence was not in the First Printing", which is roughly what 1/3 of the annotations consist of. Many of them include further information on who particular Gods are (although we still get no clues as to whom the Nameless God might be), notes from the handwritten first draft, pictures of locations visited, and pointing out connections in the text that one might not catch during a first reading (like Sam's "I believe" speech en route to Peru containing a reference to the later Coming to America story about prehistoric people crossing the Bering Strait during the ice age). A few appendices follow the main text, with a deleted scene of Shadow meeting Jesus during Odin's vigil, a list of gods appearing, and other references.)
While I would recommend the main text to everyone I know, I wouldn't recommend the Annotated Version to first time readers. More than a few plot points intregal to the big reveals gets given away in the notes, which would spoil the fun for a newbie.
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