Gaiman Neil - Inside American Gods

Text copyright 2018 by Emily Haynes.
Photographs copyright 2018 by FremantleMedia.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN: 978-1-4521-5605-7 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4521-5614-9 (epub, mobi)

Design by Jacob Covey

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BY EMILY HAYNES

NEIL : The original inspiration for writing American Gods was moving from the U.K. to America. I was an innocent and I thought because Id been to America on many occasionsand Id also written about America and spent my life watching American TV and moviesI thought that I understood America. And then I moved out here and it was so much weirder than I had imagined. I moved to Wisconsin, where it is very cold in the winter, and so many things were strange to me. I began turning to people and saying, Dont you think this is weird? And they would say, No, this is just how you do things. Then Id say, Look, this thing where you guys park a car on a frozen lake every year and then take bets for charity about when its going to fall through the icedo you think thats weird? And theyd go, No, thats just what we do, everybody does this. Then Id pass signs for things like House on the Rock and think, Well, I have to go see the House on the Rock. But Id discover they put up signs advertising it 300 miles away from where it actually is, so now Im traveling 300 miles to follow up my curiosity about the road sign. I would drive a long way and get to these places and sometimes Id go, Ah, I really understand you. And sometimes Id go, You are the weirdest place in the world. Out of all of those places, my favorite was really House on the Rock because that really is the weirdest place in the world.

The funny thing about the House on the Rock: I ended up toning it down for the book because nobody would have believed the reality. Season 2 is going to begin in the House on the Rock. People will actually get to see just how weird this place is. Its not just that it has the biggest carousel in the world; its not just that before you get to the biggest carousel in the world you get to a room with a carousel filled entirely with creepy Victorian dolls; its not the fact that most of the stuff there is fake, but not everything. I left out the hundred-piece artificial orchestra and the Statue of Liberty in battle with a giant squid with a full-sized boat in its mouth. I wound up editing a lot of it out, thinking people would not believe me.

Thats sort of where it began: Im living in America, there is weird stuff here, I want to do something with it.

The next thing that happened is I started thinking about two people meeting on a plane. It was sort of a weird scenario Id run through my head before I went to sleep each night, and all I knew was that there are two men meeting on a planeone older, one younger. One of them winds up getting on the planehe shouldnt even be on that plane, he definitely shouldnt have been bounced up to first-class. And then when he sits down in first-class, an old guy sitting next to him says, Youre late and Im offering you a job. I thought, I dont know who these men are, but Id think about them. One of them felt like hed just got out of prison and one of them was some kind of wizard or con man or something, but I wasnt even sure what. And now a lot of the weird stuff that Id been thinking about America is starting to accrete around them, like cosmic debris starting to form a planet. Its not yet a planet, its just debris, but its all orbiting together. And then in the summer of the very late nineties, I needed to go to Norway and my travel agent said to me, If youre going to Norway, did you know that if you fly via Iceland, they will give you a free stopover? I didnt know that. Its still trueIcelandair loves to encourage people to stop in Reykjavik and spend tourist dollars. I said, Thats a good thing to know. Id be delighted to. Give me a stopover, Ive always wanted to go to Iceland.

At the time, I was living very near Minneapolis. So I get on a plane, which leaves for Iceland at 7:30 at night. Im wide awake. It lands at 12:30 a.m. Minneapolis time, which is 6:30 in the morning Iceland time. Im still awake. I think, Well, Ill just keep going until it gets dark. But its like the 3rd of July, which means it doesnt get dark. Its three oclock in the morning, it looks like the suns gone behind the clouds, and at four oclock in the morning it looks like full daylight again. My hotel room does not come with anything fancy like dark curtains. So I lie there awake. And the next day, its Sunday and I head out in this weird sleepless state and everything is closed. Finally, I found the downtown tourist information place. I wandered in and there was this diorama showing the voyages of Leif Eriksson, and you could see heres the people coming to Iceland, heres the route from Iceland to Greenland, and heres the route from Greenland to Newfoundland, and this is where they would have built their little bases. Then they went home again. And I remember looking at this and thinking, I wonder if they brought their gods with them. Then thinking, I wonder if they left them behind when they went home.

I combined that question with a weird idea I had while writing a comic book called The Sandmanin the last Sandman story there was a speech Id had Loki, a Norse god, make about how there are new gods coming, gods of hospitals and freeways, gods of cell phones. And I thought, Oh, there. All of these weird, strange things. This is a book. And it felt lovely, it felt like a book, which was important for me. Also, it felt like the kind of book that would relieve my frustration, because Id just spent a couple of years doing nothing but film scripts; and the problem with writing film scripts is theyre 120 pages long. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and they have acts, and they have structure. What I loved about this idea in my head was that it was big and weird. And it wasnt going to have a beginning, middle, and endor it would, but it might have several beginnings, and lots of middles, some false ends and some real ends. It was going to be a road story, and it was going to be about all of the things Id thought about America at the time and all of the things I could see on the horizon.