The only thing American Gods shares with a King blockbuster is perhaps its heft, clocking in at a meaty 600-plus pages and satisfyingly heavy, enough to weigh down the corner of a beach mat should an unexpected chill wind rise suddenly. It seems an odd, skittish thing to do from a marketing team who perhaps wasn't quite sure in which box this imagination needed to be forced. When it was released the publishers offered to refund the price of the book to anyone who didn't find it "as good as Stephen King". My copy of American Gods (the original mass-market paperback some years later a "director's cut" was released with a further 12,000 words) has pages stained with sun-cream and crinkled by damp and heat. It wasn't his first, but American Gods feels like his first proper novel previous outings had been Neverwhere, which was essentially a novelisation of his own screenplay for a BBC TV production whose budget never quite matched his imagination, and Stardust, a slight (though satisfying) fairytale originally conceived as an illustrated book with the artist Charles Vess. It seems a little odd now, given his ubiquity, but when American Gods was published in 2001 Gaiman wasn't a household name, unless your household happened to be filled with long-boxes of the comic books on which he had built his career.
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