Neil Gaiman: American Gods - The Tenth Anniversary Edition
Tags: Neil Gaiman, anniversary, american gods, novel
When the novel American Gods was published ten years ago, Neil Gaiman went from being a writer primarily known for comics like The Sandman and Mr. Punch and novels like Neverwhere and Good Omens to one of the most successful and acclaimed writers of his generation. In addition to his novels, short stories, picture books, and movies, in the past decade Gaiman has also become one of the most beloved children’s writers of our time, his novels Coraline and The Graveyard Book having become modern classics.
He also penned an episode of Doctor Who, much to the delight of both Gaiman and the long running sci-fi show's fans. More recently, it was announced that Gaiman will be working with HBO and the director and cinematographer Robert Richardson on a series based on American Gods. Now Harper Collins is releasing the tenth anniversary edition of of the book in a hardcover edition that contains what Gaiman referres to as “the preferred text.”
SG reached out to Gaiman by phone for a brief conversation at the beginning of his book tour.
Ales Dueben: I know you’re busy dealing with the press for the next couple weeks and we’re interrupting writing time.
Neil Gaiman: (laughs) This morning was actually the only time I get on this entire trip to spend with my wife. I got to spend the morning with Amanda [Palmer] and we went out and had breakfast and it was great. And now I’m officially on tour and it’s work.
AD:
Well, then, I guess we should get to it. American Gods The Tenth Anniversary Edition is what you called “the preferred text.” What can people expect in this new edition?
NG:
It’s probably slightly more meandering. About 2003, a company called Hill House did a beautiful edition of American Gods. They came to me and they said, we want to do this beautiful edition of American Gods and I said, that’s wonderful. I said, if you’re going to do that would you like to bring out the book in the way that it was when I handed it in as opposed to what I then edited it down to? They said yes that would be fun. Then I realized that of course I’d handed it in and it was about 200,000 words long and then I cut it down to about 180,000 words. A lot of those cuts and edits I was quite pleased with.
It’s a little more meandering. It’s a little more sauntering. Anybody who ever read American Gods and complained that it was slow-moving is going to be even more pissed off with the preferred text, because it’s slightly slower moving. It really is the directors cut.
It’s a little more meandering. It’s a little more sauntering. Anybody who ever read American Gods and complained that it was slow-moving is going to be even more pissed off with the preferred text, because it’s slightly slower moving. It really is the directors cut.
AD:
It’s interesting that the book comes out now just after the television project with HBO was announced.
NG:
Yeah it’s one of those things where it’s completely accidental. We’ve had a decade of people trying to buy the American Gods film rights and it never worked out. Then two months ago I was in LA for a meeting. I was there with the Playtone people, the HBO people came in, we said this is how it’s going to be, this is how we’re going to get it to work, these are the beats, this is the giant plan. I expected the HBO people to say, well, that’s very very interesting. We’ll go away and get back to you. They sat down, listened, nodded their heads and said, great, let’s do it. That took us all slightly by surprise, possibly including them. And right now I can’t talk about it at all. I’ve actually been slightly surprised that there’s already press and various articles out there, because it’s not yet set. I’m somebody who isn’t normally comfortable talking about things until you’ve shot the pilot and everybody’s happy with it and everybody’s going good, this really works.
AD:
You did recently tweet: “And for those asking, No, 6 years of AMERICAN GODS on TV doesn’t mean just the 1st book. It means I need to write the 2nd now, for a start.”
NG:
That’s true.
There’s always been so much more plot than I got into the first book. Even while I was writing the first book, I knew that Harper Collins was not going to publish a thousand page book at that point, so there were big areas that never got covered. By the same token, there’s huge areas that I always figured that I’d cover in the next American Gods book. The new gods got fairly short shrift in the first book and I wanted to do a book with them. There’s all sorts of weird other things that never made it in. It was very strange reading through the Tenth Anniversary Edition and noticing the number of bits in it, lines of dialogue and things that actually were planned to develop in the second book. So yes. There’s potentially more to come.
There’s always been so much more plot than I got into the first book. Even while I was writing the first book, I knew that Harper Collins was not going to publish a thousand page book at that point, so there were big areas that never got covered. By the same token, there’s huge areas that I always figured that I’d cover in the next American Gods book. The new gods got fairly short shrift in the first book and I wanted to do a book with them. There’s all sorts of weird other things that never made it in. It was very strange reading through the Tenth Anniversary Edition and noticing the number of bits in it, lines of dialogue and things that actually were planned to develop in the second book. So yes. There’s potentially more to come.
AD:
I remember you mentioned in the acknowledgements about your assistant researched internment camps, among other things, and you never used those things in the book.
NG:
I had a great short story plotted and actually I researched it all. It was going to be set in the 1940’s in a Japanese internment camp in North America and I just couldn’t fit the story in, so I put it to one side.
AD:
There are two short stories plus Anansi Boys which are in the same universe as American Gods, but here you’re talking more about a straightforward kind of sequel.
NG:
Yeah. Anansi Boys was never a sequel. It was much more the other way around. I actually borrowed a character from Anansi Boys, which is a book I hadn’t yet written, for American Gods. I never really thought of Anansi Boys as a sequel to American Gods. It’s another book set in that universe although in truth, I suspect all of my books take place in the same universe. There are definitely things that tie Stardust to American Gods, for example. It’s all sort of tied together around the back.
AD:
You announced a new book a few years back, Monkey and Me, a nonfiction book about your travels in China and the mythology of the Monkey King. How is it coming along?
NG:
It got slightly subsumed into a giant Monkey project right now. I’m working with a Chinese producer on a movie. The book hasn’t gone away. It’s slowed down. There are huge chunks of it written. I just spent the last few weeks writing another forty pages, but some of the monkey work is going into the movie right now.
AD:
Can you talk about the movie?
NG:
What can I say about the film? It’s with a wonderful Chinese producer named Mr. Zhang. The plan is for it to be three one hundred million dollar movies and each of them telling a chunk of the monkey story.
AD:
You spoke earlier about everything coming together at once, and your episode of Doctor Who aired last month.
NG:
Yes. I seem to spend half my life with people asking what I’m doing and then half my life with people incredibly puzzled that everything is happening at the same time. I think it was late 2007 where Stardust and Beowulf were both in cinemas at the same time. Beowulf was written in 1997 and Stardust had happened incredibly fast then happening incredibly slowly and then they came out at the same time. People were like, so, you’ve given up comics and books and are now you’re just doing movies? I was saying, why would you think that? They said, well, two movies out the same month. No it’s not that. It just happened that way.
But yes, Doctor Who. Wasn’t it fun? I was so pleased.
But yes, Doctor Who. Wasn’t it fun? I was so pleased.
AD:
Your episode, The Doctor’s Wife, more than just telling a story, you really seemed intent on expressing something about who the Doctor is and what the show means.
NG:
I’ve been watching Doctor Who since I was three years old and I’ve loved Doctor Who since I was three. And so you’re talking about something that’s absolutely part of my life, part of my psyche, part of the way that I see the universe. Suddenly I was told, yes, I could write an episode. From my point of view, that was the most glorious thing in the world. I had no idea if I’m ever going to get to do another one, so there’s a sort of an effort to try and put everything that I thought or believed or think about Doctor Who. I tried to put it all in there. I tried to make sure that everything I ever wondered about Doctor Who was in there too. I wanted running down corridors. Everything I’d ever thought about the TARDIS. Trying to write a Doctor who’s funny and brilliant and did all the things that I’d ever wanted Doctor Who to do. I was all great. And so yeah I loved it.
AD:
There are a few lines that stick with me, but one where the Doctor complains that she never took him where he wanted to go and she said, but I always took you where you needed to go. That was just so well said, but I never heard it expressed.
NG:
You know it was something that I’d believed ever since I was a kid. I’d go, oh the TARDIS must have something to do with this. Because he never turns up in boring places. The TARDIS never drops him off someplace where nothing’s happening. It may not be where he wanted to go, but it’s where he needed to be.
AD:
You always seem to be working on many things, so in closing, what else are you in the midst of?
NG:
I’m in the midst of putting together a theatrical project with Stephin Merritt of the band The Magnetic Fields. It’s one we’ve been talking about for several years but it’s actually starting to move into the world of reality. I’ve wanted to do an original theatrical thing.
AD:
Does this predate the Coraline musical that Merritt did a few years ago?
NG:
No, it’s something that we started talking about when he was working on Coraline, but it’s very very different from Coraline. It’s completely original and I hope if it works it won’t be like anything anyone else has done. It’s about the grand guignol. That’s happening. And I’m writing a children’s book right now for Dave McKean which I’m about halfway through. It was meant to be a very short book like The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish, but...
And I am in The Simpsons, which is glorious. On a episode called The Book Job which will come out in October. I thought I was going to be one of those celebrities who comes in and just does one line and instead I discovered that no, I’m actually part of the story and they wrote this whole thing for me. That was a bit nerve-wracking.
And I am in The Simpsons, which is glorious. On a episode called The Book Job which will come out in October. I thought I was going to be one of those celebrities who comes in and just does one line and instead I discovered that no, I’m actually part of the story and they wrote this whole thing for me. That was a bit nerve-wracking.
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