I would be more interested in knowing exactly which immortal entity Neil Gaiman sold his soul to.

Perhaps he is one himself, merely moonlighting as a mortal writer.

A shame it looks so bloody. Probably too much for my kid who's read the book. Should be interesting though.

This... was not a good book, like, at all. Does not bode well for this being a decent t.v. series.

ubie has been banned for this comment. Let this be a lesson to all of you. ;)

I will not be subject to criminal abuse!

Seriously though, it's bad, I do not understand the appeal of this. Gaiman has so much good, interesting, fun, thought provoking and insightful work that it makes this drivel that much worse by comparison.

I'm honestly curious to know what you thought was so bad about it. I thought it was a fun read, if not exactly great.

Based on what I remember from however long ago i read it; the story is mind numbing in the sense that it makes you want to bash your head in to a concrete pillar, the dialog is abysmal, the main character appears to have been written with a 12 year old's idea of a wronged man in prison for a crime he didn't commit and overall the whole thing just came off as trite. I mean, c'mon, the god of the fucking internet? Just stop Neil, please, put this away in a dark corner and do something else.

Personally, I found the idea of immigrants, refugees and slaves from different cultures actually generating new manifestations of their traditional gods on the new continent a really cool idea. If you are willing to accept that idea, then it seems reasonable that as cultures merge and change, new gods will manifest and the old gods will struggle to maintain relevance. Granted, though, the techno god was pretty silly.

I think Neil Gaiman is great as an ideas man. He's really good at creating the worlds and backstory, especially good at taking existing stories and twisting them to make them fresh and interesting. If there was a job writing mythologies, that'd be right up his street.
Where it falls down is his inability to write interesting, emotionally complex and empathetic characters, especially protagonists. Shadow has zero personality. Absolutely none. I thought at one point that maybe it was like a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance thing, and plot point X Y or Z would change him, he'd suddenly be a real person, and change his name from Shadow to someting else (a pretty NG thing to do). Nope. Boring and unlikeable the whole way through.
Same goes for Sandman. Potentially really interesting setup, with the different anthropomorphisations, etc, etc, and lots of different things going on, but Morpheus is the most boring, passive, mopey idiot ever. And as an aside, it's cringey as fuck that he and NG resemble each other so much.
I haven't read Neverwhere for a long while, but remember thinking all the characters there were flat too.

He is very good at mythos, though. If someone else (co-)writes the screenplay I can see it being good.

Yeah, good point. His characters are a bit flat. I most recently listened to The Graveyard Book, and thought that was some of his better characterization, and it's essentially a children's book. I have to admit that it's primarily the ideas, then the story-line, then the characters that keep me interested in a book.

Also, while I'm a proponent of laying eyes on paper, a good audio book reader can turn an otherwise difficult piece into a pleasure. I recently finished Moby Dick that way and thoroughly enjoyed it, having failed to get very far on paper after several attempts over the last 30 years.

I read American Gods on paper when it first came out and remember enjoying it, so when I heard they were taking it to screen, I listened to it on my commute. There's something very powerful about listening to stories.

Everybody knows that the God the Internet (or its remnant) constructs heart-stopping works of art from pieces of rubbish in orbit.

And it's got a great interface.

I did like American Gods, even if it's not the best thing NG ever did, which may have been in the comics. I really like NG alot. He's like Alan Moore but less of a prig in person.and he's a better writer than Alan Moore.

All that said,I think that this has the potential to translate well to moving pictures. See we shall.