Recommendations
Books Like American Gods
The old gods are dying in America — and a war between them and the new gods of technology is coming
Neil Gaiman's American Gods is a road novel, a meditation on immigration and belief, and a war story. Shadow Moon is released from prison three days before his wife is killed in a car accident, and is immediately hired by a man calling himself Mr. Wednesday — who is Odin, the Norse god of wisdom, hustling his way across America to gather the old gods for a war. The novel asks what happens to the gods that immigrants brought with them to a country that has its own myths, and what the new gods of technology, media, and celebrity are doing to the American landscape of belief. If the mythology embedded in ordinary America, the dark humor, and Gaiman's prose gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.
- 1Buy
Stardust
by Neil Gaiman
Gaiman's own earlier novel — a fairy tale in which a young man crosses into the magical land of Faerie and discovers the star he came to retrieve is a person. Stardust is lighter and more romantic than American Gods but shares the same sense of mythology as a living force underneath ordinary life.
- 2Buy
Neverwhere
by Neil Gaiman
A mild-mannered Londoner falls through the cracks of the city into London Below, a world of shadows and monsters that exists beneath the streets — Gaiman's first adult novel, and the template for American Gods' sense of a hidden world running parallel to the surface one.
- 3Buy
Anansi Boys
by Neil Gaiman
Gaiman's companion novel set in the same world as American Gods — Fat Charlie Nancy discovers that his late father was the African trickster god Anansi, and that he has a brother. Warmer and funnier than American Gods, and directly connected to the character of Mr. Nancy.
- 4Buy
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
Magic returning to England through two men who have very different ideas about what magic should be — Clarke has Gaiman's same sense of a magical system embedded in the history of a specific place, and the same interest in what it means for that magic to be in conflict with the modern world.
- 5Buy
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
by Neil Gaiman
A man returns to his childhood home and remembers a terrible thing that happened when he was seven — Gaiman's most personal novel, and the one that most directly connects his sense of mythology to the specific experience of being a child in a world that is stranger and more dangerous than adults acknowledge.
- 6Buy
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
by Becky Chambers
A crew of different species navigating a galaxy together — Chambers is not a mythologist, but she shares Gaiman's interest in what different kinds of beings make of the same world, and in the texture of daily life as a lens for understanding larger questions.
- 7Buy
The Night Circus
by Erin Morgenstern
A competition between two young magicians inside a black-and-white circus — Morgenstern has Gaiman's same gift for a world that is more beautiful and more dangerous than it appears, and the same sense of magic as something old that is being pushed out by a modernity that doesn't believe in it.
- 8Buy
Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke
A man who lives in a house that is larger on the inside than the outside, who has forgotten that other worlds exist — Clarke's most recent novel has American Gods' same sense of a protagonist inside a system whose rules he doesn't fully understand, and the same revelation when those rules are finally exposed.
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