American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  Lettie said, “I knew there was something funny about it.”

  I looked up at Old Mrs. Hempstock. “How do you know?”

  “Good question, luvvie. It’s electron decay, mostly. You have to look at things closely to see the electrons. They’re the little dinky ones that look like tiny smiles. The neutrons are the gray ones that look like frowns. The electrons were all a bit too smiley for 1912, so then I checked the sides of the letters and the old king’s head, and everything was a tad too crisp and sharp. Even where they were worn, it was as if they’d been made to be worn.”

  “You must have very good eyesight,” I told her. I was impressed. She gave me back the coin.

  “Not as good as it once was, but then, when you get to be my age, your eyesight won’t be as sharp as it once was, neither.” And she let out a guffaw as if she had said something very funny.

  “How old is that?”

  Lettie looked at me, and I was worried that I’d said something rude. Sometimes adults didn’t like to be asked their ages, and sometimes they did. In my experience, old people did. They were proud of their ages. Mrs. Wollery was seventy-seven, and Mr. Wollery was eighty-nine, and they liked telling us how old they were.

  Old Mrs. Hempstock went over to a cupboard, and took out several colorful vases. “Old enough,” she said. “I remember when the moon was made.”

  “Hasn’t there always been a moon?”

  “Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky—it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue . . .” She half-filled each of the vases at the sink. Then she took a pair of blackened kitchen scissors, and snipped off the bottom half-inch of stem from each of the daffodils.

  I said, “Are you sure it’s not that man’s ghost doing this? Are you sure we aren’t being haunted?”

  They both laughed then, the girl and the old woman, and I felt stupid. I said, “Sorry.”

  “Ghosts can’t make things,” said Lettie. “They aren’t even good at moving things.”

  Old Mrs. Hempstock said, “Go and get your mother. She’s doing laundry.” Then, to me, “You shall help me with the daffs.”

  I helped her put the flowers into the vases, and she asked my opinion on where to put the vases in the kitchen. We placed the vases where I suggested, and I felt wonderfully important.

  The daffodils sat like patches of sunlight, making that dark wooden kitchen even more cheerful. The floor was made of red and gray flagstones. The walls were whitewashed.

  The old woman gave me a lump of honeycomb, from the Hemp-stocks’ own beehive, on a chipped saucer, and poured a little cream over it from a jug. I ate it with a spoon, chewing the wax like gum, letting the honey flow into my mouth, sweet and sticky with an aftertaste of wildflowers.

  I was scraping the last of the cream and honey from the saucer when Lettie and her mother came into the kitchen. Mrs. Hempstock still had big Wellington boots on, and she strode in as if she were in an enormous hurry. “Mother!” she said. “Giving the boy honey. You’ll rot his teeth.”

  Old Mrs. Hempstock shrugged. “I’ll have a word with the wigglers in his mouth,” she said. “Get them to leave his teeth alone.”

  “You can’t just boss bacteria around like that,” said the younger Mrs. Hempstock. “They don’t like it.”

  “Stuff and silliness,” said the old lady. “You leave wigglers alone and they’ll be carrying on like anything. Show them who’s boss and they can’t do enough for you. You’ve tasted my cheese.” She turned to me. “I’ve won medals for my cheese. Medals. Back in the old king’s day there were those who’d ride for a week to buy a round of my cheese. They said that the king himself had it with his bread and his boys, Prince Dickon and Prince Geoffrey and even little Prince John, they swore it was the finest cheese they had ever tasted—”

  “Gran,” said Lettie, and the old lady stopped, mid-flow.

  Lettie’s mother said, “You’ll be needing a hazel wand. And,” she added, somewhat doubtfully, “I suppose you could take the lad. It’s his coin, and it’ll be easier to carry if he’s with you. Something she made.”

  “She?” said Lettie.

  She was holding her horn-handled penknife, with the blade closed.

  “Tastes like a she,” said Lettie’s mother. “I might be wrong, mind.”

  “Don’t take the boy,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Asking for trouble, that is.”

  I was disappointed.

  “We’ll be fine,” said Lettie. “I’ll take care of him. Him and me. It’ll be an adventure. And he’ll be company. Please, Gran?”

  I looked up at Old Mrs. Hempstock with hope on my face, and waited.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, if it all goes wobbly,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock.

  “Thank you, Gran. I won’t. And I’ll be careful.”

  Old Mrs. Hempstock sniffed. “Now, don’t do anything stupid. Approach it with care. Bind it, close its ways, send it back to sleep.”

  “I know,” said Lettie. “I know all that. Honestly. We’ll be fine.”

  That’s what she said. But we weren’t.

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  Acknowledgments

  It’s been a long book, and a long journey, and I owe many people a great deal.

  Mrs. Hawley lent me her Florida house to write in, and all I had to do in return was scare away the vultures. She lent me her Irish house to finish it in and cautioned me not to scare away the ghosts. My thanks to her and Mr. Hawley for all their kindness and generosity. Jonathan and Jane lent me their house and hammock to write in, and all I had to do was fish the occasional peculiar Floridian beastie out of the lizard pool. I’m very grateful to them all.

  Dan Johnson, M.D., gave me medical information whenever I needed it, pointed out stray and unintentional anglicisms (everybody else did this as well), answered the oddest questions, and, on one July day, even flew me around northern Wisconsin in a tiny plane. In addition to keeping my life going by proxy while I wrote this book, my assistant, the fabulous Lorraine Garland, became very blasé about finding out the population of small American towns for me; I’m still not sure quite how she did it. (She’s part of a band called The Flash Girls; buy their new record, Play Each Morning, Wild Queen, and make her happy.) Terry Pratchett helped unlock a knotty plot point for me on the train to Gothenburg. Eric Edelman answered my diplomatic questions. Anna Sunshine Ison unearthed a bunch of stuff for me on the west coast Japanese internment camps, which will have to wait for another book to be written, for it never quite fitted into this one. I took the best line of dialogue in the epilogue from Gene Wolfe, to whom, my thanks. Sergeant Kathy Ertz graciously answered even my weirdest police procedural questions and Deputy Sheriff Marshall Multhauf took me on a drive-along. Pete Clark submitted to some ridiculously personal questioning with grace and good humor. Dale Robertson was the book’s consulting hydrologist. I appreciated Dr. Jim Miller’s comments about people, language, and fish, as I did the linguistic help of Margret Rodas. Jamy Ian Swiss made sure that the coin magic was magical. Any mistakes in the book are mine, not theirs.

  Many good people read the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions, corrections, encouragement, and information. I am especially grateful to Colin Greenland and Susanna Clarke, John Clute, and Samuel R. Delany. I’d also like to thank Owl Goingback (who really does have the world’s coolest name), Iselin Røsjø Evensen, Peter Straub, Jonathan Carroll, Kelli Bickman, Dianna Graf, Lenny Henry, Pete Atkins, Amy Horsting, Chris Ewen, Teller, Kelly Link, Barb Gilly, Will Shetterly, Connie Zastoupil, Rantz Hoseley, Diana Schutz, Steve Brust, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Roz Kaveney, Ian McDowell, Karen Berger, Wendy Japhet, Terje Nordberg, Gwenda Bond, Therese Littleton, Lou Aronica, Hy Bender, Mark Askwith, Alan Moore (who also lent me “Litvinoff’s Book”), and the original Joe Sanders. Thanks also to Rebecca Wilson; and particular thanks to Stacy Weiss, for her insight. After she read the first draft, Diana Wynne Jon
es warned me what kind of book this was, and the perils I risked writing it, and she’s been right on every count so far.

  I wish Professor Frank McConnell were still with us. I think he would have enjoyed this one.

  Once I’d written the first draft I realized that a number of other people had tackled these themes before I ever got to them: in particular, my favorite unfashionable author, James Branch Cabell; the late Roger Zelazny; and, of course, the inimitable Harlan Ellison, whose collection Deathbird Stories burned itself onto the back of my head when I was still of an age where a book could change me forever.

  I can never quite see the point of noting down for posterity the music you listened to while writing a book, and there was an awful lot of music listened to while I was writing this. Still, without Greg Brown’s Dream Café and the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs it would have been a different book, so thanks to Greg and to Stephin. And I feel it my duty to tell you that you can experience the music of the House on the Rock on tape or CD, including that of the Mikado machine and of the World’s Largest Carousel. It’s unlike, although certainly not better than, anything else you’ve heard. Write to: The House on the Rock, Spring Green, WI 53588 USA, or call (608) 935-3639.

  My agents—Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House, Jon Levin and Erin Culley La Chapelle at CAA—were invaluable as sounding boards and pillars of wisdom.

  Many people, who were waiting for things I had promised them just as soon as I finished writing this book, were astonishingly patient. I’d like to thank the good folk at Warner Brothers pictures (particularly Kevin McCormick and Lorenzo di Bonaventura), at Village Roadshow, at Sunbow, and at Miramax; and Shelly Bond, who put up with a lot.

  The two people without whom: Jennifer Hershey at HarperCollins in the U.S. and Doug Young at Hodder Headline in the U.K. I’m lucky to have good editors, and these are two of the best editors I’ve known. Not to mention two of the most uncomplaining, patient, and, as the deadlines whirled past us like dry leaves in a gust of wind, positively stoic.

  Bill Massey came in at the end, at Headline, and lent the book his editorial eagle eye. Kelly Notaras helped shepherd it through production with grace and aplomb.

  Lastly, I want to thank my family, Mary, Mike, Holly, and Maddy, who were the most patient of all, who loved me, and who, for long periods during the writing of this book, put up with my going away both to write and to find America—which, turned out, when I eventually found it, to have been in America all along.

  Neil Gaiman near Kinsale, County Cork 15 January 2001

  ON THE ROAD TO AMERICAN GODS:

  SELECTED PASSAGES FROM

  NEIL GAIMAN’S ONLINE JOURNAL

  (www.americangods.com)

  1. FEBRUARY 9 2001: IT BEGINS

  2. FEBRUARY 2001: REGARDING AMERICAN GODS AND PERMISSIONS

  3. MARCH 2, 2001: THE COPYEDITING PROCESS

  4. MARCH 7, 2001: READING AND WRITING

  5. MARCH 17, 2001: AN AMERICAN GODS “OUTTAKE”

  6. MARCH 19, 2001: THE COPYEDITING PROCESS II

  7. MARCH 27, 2001: THE BOOK PROMOTION PROCESS

  8. APRIL 11, 2001: SIGNING DO’S AND DON’TS

  9. APRIL 16, 2001: ON BLURBS

  10. APRIL 29, 2001: NEBULA AWARDS SPEECH

  11. MAY 10, 2001: REGARDING AUTHOR PHOTOS

  12. MAY 12, 2001: ON DOUGLAS ADAMS

  13. MAY 13, 2001: ON DOUGLAS ADAMS II

  14. MAY 15, 2001: AMERICAN GODS AND E-BOOKS (HOW YOU CAME TO READ THIS)

  15. MAY 16, 2001: REGARDING THE REAL HOUSE ON THE ROCK

  16. MAY 28, 2001: THE LAW OF TYPOS; THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  FEBRUARY

  Friday, February 09, 2001

  June the 19th 2001 is the publication date of American Gods, a book which despite the many shelves in this office filled with books with my name on the spine, feels an awful lot like a first novel. (Perhaps because it was the first long work I’ve done without any collaborative input from anyone, and that wasn’t first something else.) And this, in case you were wondering, is the occasional journal on the americangods.com website. I thought the journal could count us down to publication, and see us through the US and the UK publication and tours for the book in June and July.

  I first suggested we do something like this to my editor, the redoubtable Jennifer Hershey, about a year ago, while the book was still being written (a process that continued until about 3 weeks ago). She preferred to wait until the book was on the conveyor belt to actual publication, thus sparing the reading world lots of entries like “Feb 13th: wrote some stuff. It was crap.” and “Feb 14th: wrote some brilliant stuff. This is going to be such a good novel. Honest it is.” followed by “Feb 15th. no, it’s crap” and so on. It was a bit like wrestling a bear. Some days I was on top. Most days, the bear was on top. So you missed watching an author staring in bafflement as the manuscript got longer and longer, and the deadlines flew about like dry leaves in a gale, and the book remained unfinished.

  And then one day about three weeks ago it was done. And after that I spent a week cutting and trimming it. (I’d read Stephen King’s On Writing on the plane home from Ireland, where I’d gone to do final rewrites and reworkings, and was fired up enough by his war on adverbs that I did a search through the manuscript for ——-ly, and peered at each adverb suspiciously before letting it live or zapping it into oblivion. A lot of them survived. Still, according to the old proverb, God is better pleased with adverbs than with nouns. . .)

  Today I wrote a letter to go in the front of a Quick and Dirty reading edition Harper will put out — taken from the file I sent them, so it’ll be filled with transatlantic spelling, odd formatting errors and the rest, but it’ll be something to give to the buyers from bookstores and to people who get advance manuscripts so they can see what kind of book this is.

  I have no idea what kind of book this is. Or rather, there’s nothing quite like it out there that I can point to. Sooner or later some reviewer will say something silly but quotable like “If JRR Tolkein had written The Bonfire of the Vanities. . .” and it’ll go on the paperback cover and thus put off everyone who might have enjoyed it.

  This is what I wrote about it in the letter in the Quick & Dirty proof:

  American Gods is the most ambitious book I’ve written. It took longer to write, was a harder and stranger beast than anything I’ve tried before.

  It’s a thriller, I suppose, although as many of the thrills occur in headspace as in real life, and it’s a murder mystery; it’s a travel guide, and it’s the story of a war. It’s a history. It’s funny, although the humour is pretty dark.

  It’s the story of a man called Shadow and the job he is offered when he gets out of prison.

  When I finish a project, I sometimes like to to go back and look at the original outline – see how far the project came from my first thoughts. When I finished American Gods, in January 2001, I looked, for the very first time in two and a half years, at the letter I wrote to the publisher describing the book I planned to write next. (I wrote it in a hotel room in Iceland in June 1998.) The outline ended like this:

  If Neverwhere was about the London underneath, this would be about the America between, and on-top-of, and around. It’s an America with strange mythic depths. Ones that can hurt you. Or kill you. Or make you mad.

  American Gods will be a big book, I hope. A sort of weird, sprawling picaresque epic, which starts out relatively small and gets larger. Not horror, although I plan a few moments that are up there with anything I did in Sandman, and not strictly fantasy either. I see it as a distorting mirror; a book of danger and secrets, of romance and magic.

  It’s about the soul of America, really. What people brought to America; what found them when they came; and the things that lie sleeping beneath it all. And, oddly enough, that seemed to describe the book I’d written pretty well.

  And the other thing I’m doing (you’d think I’d have people who would do this for me, but no, it’s just me) is sending out the e
-mails to music publishers telling them I’d like to quote their song at the start of a , and then waiting for their reply. There’s no commonly agreed scale of pricing on this — $150 is pretty usual (as the author is paying), but some publishers ask for a whole lot more. If they ask for too much more I say sod it and go and find a good public domain quote that does the same thing.

  So, there. Journal entry #1 done. & now back to my day job (which currently mostly involves writing Death: The High Cost of Living.)posted by Neil Gaiman 12:45 PM

  * * *

  The journal is open. posted by Neil Gaiman 8:45 AM

  * * *

  Tuesday, February 20, 2001

  There’s coin magic in AMERICAN GODS, of the conjuring kind. And just as I ran the medical parts (and the post mortem parts) past a doctor, I ran the coin magic past a top coin magician — Jamy Ian Swiss, better known as a card magician. (I met him some years ago, at a Penn and Teller gig in Las Vegas I attended — P&T had just guest-starred in the Babylon 5 episode I’d written, ‘The Day of the Dead’).

  Jamy sent me a terrific professional’s-eye critique of the coin magic, and I can make some subtle changes in the copy-editing (which I think will start tomorrow, Wednesday, at least on the US version — I’ve been told I’ll get the copy-edited manuscript by lunchtime). (And there’s always a little nervousness in receiving a copy-edited mss. One never knows what kind of copy editor one will have got. On STARDUST I had a lovely one, who even made sure that the UK spelling grey rather than gray held throughout, because she thought it more appropriate. On the book before that I had a copy editor who, it seemed at the time, repunctuated practically every sentence for no good reason, leaving me muttering “Look, if I’d wanted a comma there I would have bloody well put a comma there” too often for comfort.)

  But I was talking about coin magic, not copy editing. Sorry.

  This is from my last e-mail to Jamy Ian Swiss, who was grumbling about the depiction of stage magic in most forms of fiction. And I thought it might be interesting for you, hypothetical journal reader.