Oreskes’s rumbling baritone deftly brings Shadow to life McLarty is the perfect combination of wicked and winsome and Boutsikaris’s earnest narration-he’s narrated more than a hundred audiobooks-gathers the whole unwieldy tapestry together. From Gaiman’s mannered British interludes to the expert narration of Dennis Boutsikaris, Daniel Oreskes, Ron McLarty, and Sarah Jones, the audiobook rolls along with the delicious, strange rhythm of the road narrative it’s telling. Instead, it was more compelling than it had any right to be. Last year, when Starz aired a TV series based on the book, I liked some things-Ian McShane was the embodiment of the gruff, sly Wednesday-but the show’s fixation on slow, violin-scored rains of blood, and its general sacrifice of characterization for slick visuals, grew dull long before the season finale.įeeling nostalgic, I downloaded the tenth-anniversary edition of the audiobook to my iPhone, ready to use the familiar tale to soothe me to sleep. I wanted to hunker down in the back seat with Shadow, the book’s taciturn protagonist, and Wednesday, the con-man god, and all the rest of the motley crew, and immerse myself in America’s long, rambling highways, as Gaiman, pictured at right, so patently had. Neil Gaiman’s sprawling novel, from 2001, had influences that at the time I hadn’t really encountered-echoes of Tim O’Brien, Don DeLillo, and Stephen King, not to mention the mythologies it explicitly draws from-and that were completely exhilarating for a suburban teen-ager.

I first fell in love with “American Gods” when I was fifteen.

American gods novel