Fire and Hemlock
A cult masterpiece of mythic YA — the standard against which Tam Lin retellings are measured — and the Jones novel writers (Gaiman included) most often name when asked what the form can do.
Book Entry · Fantasy
What is American Gods about?
Shadow Moon leaves prison three days early for his wife's funeral and is hired, mid-flight, by Mr Wednesday: con-man, one glass eye, Wodan in a road-stained suit, recruiting for a war between the gods immigrants carried to America — now scraping livings as morticians, cab drivers and prostitutes — and the new gods of media, freeway and silicon. The road trip runs through roadside attractions (places of power, naturally), the eerie idyll of Lakeside, a coin-trick resurrection and a two-man grift centuries deep. Gaiman's great American novel-as-theology: belief as economy, the Midwest as mythic landscape, all of it written by an Englishman in a Minneapolis-adjacent farmhouse.
Why it matters
Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Bram Stoker awards in one sweep — the codifying text of the gods-among-us genre — and a Starz television series besides.
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Night's Master
World Fantasy Award finalist and the founding volume of the Flat Earth cycle — a key text of mythic, eroticised fantasy whose influence runs through Gaiman's Sandman (acknowledged) and modern dark fantasy generally.