Best 2001 Adventures (1)

By: Joshua Glenn
December 6, 2020

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 2001 adventure novels.

Neil Gaiman’s fantasy adventure American Gods.

Released from prison when his wife is killed in a car accident — she’d been having an affair with his best friend — the taciturn “Shadow” Moon finds work as a bodyguard for a Mr. Wednesday. Who is, we will eventually discover, an earthly avatar of a Norse god. Mr. Wednesday is on a cross-country pilgrimage, rallying his fellow deities for a last-ditch battle against America’s new gods — the personifications, that is, of phenomena that we now worship, including an adult-sized fat child (the Internet), men in black (conspiracy theories), and the goddess of media, who communicates through characters in TV shows. Shadow himself becomes the focus of this epic struggle, and Mr. Wednesday becomes his guardian — rather than the other way around. During a trip to the land of the dead, Shadow discovers his own true nature… and begins to understand the true stakes of the game in which he has become entangled. Oh, and his ex-wife returns from the dead as an ass-kicking zombie of sorts!

Fun facts: Winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards. A comic book adaptation, American Gods: Shadows, was published by Dark Horse Comics starting in March 2017. There have been two seasons, so far, of the Starz television adaptation (2017–2019), with a third season scheduled for 2021.

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Best 2001 Adventures (1)

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