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 Bros. 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 Harper Collins in the U.S. and Doug Young at Hodder Headline in the UK. 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 polish.
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
APPENDIX
I’d been looking forward to writing the meeting of Shadow and Jesus for most of the book: I couldn’t write about America without mentioning Jesus, after all. He’s part of the warp and the weft of the country.
And then I wrote their first scene together in chapter fifteen, and it didn’t work for me; I felt like I was alluding to something that I couldn’t simply mention in passing and then move on from. It was too big.
So I took it out again.
I nearly put it back in, assembling this author’s preferred text. Actually, I did put it back in. And then I took it out again, and put it here. You can read it. I’m just not sure that it’s necessarily part of American Gods.
Consider it an apocryphal scene, perhaps.
One day, Shadow will come back to America.
There are some extremely interesting conversations awaiting him…
People were walking around beside him, in his mind or out of it. Some of the people he seemed to recognize, others were strangers.
“And what’s a stranger but a friend you haven’t met yet?” said someone to him, passing him a drink.
He took the drink, walked with the person down a light brown corridor. They were in a Spanish-style building, and they moved from adobe corridor to open courtyard to corridor once more, while the sun beat down on the water gardens and the fountains.
“It might be an enemy you’ve not met yet too,” said Shadow.
“Bleak, Shadow, very bleak,” said the man. Shadow sipped his drink. It was a brackish red wine.
“It’s been a bleak few months,” said Shadow. “It’s been a bleak few years.”
The man was slender, tanned, of medium height, and he looked up at Shadow with a gentle, empathetic smile. “How’s the vigil going, Shadow?”
“The tree?” Shadow had forgotten that he was hanging from the silver tree. He wondered what else he had forgotten. “It hurts.”
“Suffering is sometimes cleansing,” said the man. His clothes were casual, but expensive. “It can purify.”
“It can also fuck you up,” said Shadow.
The man led Shadow into a vast office. There was no desk in there, though. “Have you thought about what it means to be a god?” asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. “It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people’s minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you’re a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.”
Shadow sat in a comfortable leather chair, by the window. The man sat on the enormous sofa. “Great place you’ve got here,” said Shadow.
“Thanks. Be honest now, how’s the wine?”
Shadow hesitated. “Kind of sour, I’m afraid.”
“Sorry. That’s the trouble with wine. Okay wine I can do easily, but good wine, let alone great wine…well, you’ve got weather, soil acidity, rainfall, even which side of a hill the grapes are grown on. Don’t get me started on vintages…”
“It’s fine, really,” said Shadow, and he swallowed the rest of the wine in one long gulp. He could feel it burning in his empty stomach, feel the bubbles of drunkenness rising at the back of his head.
“And then this whole deal of new gods, old gods,” said his friend. “You ask me, I welcome new gods. Bring them on. The god of the guns. The god of bombs. All the gods of ignorance and intolerance, of self-righteousness, idiocy and blame. All the stuff they try and land me with. Take a lot of the weight off my shoulders.” He sighed.
“But you’re so successful,” said Shadow. “Look at this place.” He gestured, indicating the paintings on the walls, the hardwood floor, the fountain in the courtyard below them.
His friend nodded. “It has a cost,” he said. “Like I said. You have to be all things to all people. Pretty soon, you’re spread so thin you’re hardly there at all. It’s not good.”
He reached out one callused hand—the fingers were etched with old chisel scars—and squeezed Shadow’s hand. “I know, I know. I should count my blessings. And one of those blessings is getting time just to meet you like this, and to talk. It’s great that you were able to make it,” he said. “Really great. Don’t be a stranger now.”
“No. I’ll just be a friend you’ve not met yet,” said Shadow.
“Funny guy,” said the man with the beard.
“Ratatosk, ratatosk,” chattered the squirrel in Shadow’s ear. He could taste the bitter wine still, in his mouth and the back of his throat, and it was almost dark.
* * *
The following bonus material first appeared in the 2005 paperback edition of American Gods: The Author’s Preferred Text, published by Review, an imprint of Headline Book Publishing, Great Britain.
* * *
An Interview with Neil Gaiman
Which godlike powers would you like to posses?
I want to make time stretchier. I would like much more rubbery days, and I just wish that you could lean on a week, and sort of push the walls out a bit, and suddenly about nineteen extra days would rush in to fill the vacuum.
There is not enough time, and I wind up just wanting to do things that I don’t have time for. There are so many things that I’d love to do, and I have to put off, or that it’s a matter of me choosing, when really I’d love to do both. And if only time were infinitely stretchy, I could.
What is your favorite roadside attraction?
The House on the Rock in American Gods actually is real. Most people think I made it up, whereas in actual fact I just toned it down a bit so that people would believe it. Because being a real place it has no obligation to be likely. So I left out the 120-piece robot orchestra and other stuff.