I have no idea what your “joke” is referring to.
I don’t expect you to. Poll a thousand people and maybe three of them will know Creatures of Light and Darkness.
Yet you’re snarking about it.
One of those three people would be Neil Gaiman. He dedicated the book "For absent friends – Kathy Acker and Roger Zelazny and all points in between”. Stripped down to the shit that matters, American Gods is CL&D beat for beat. It certainly isn’t accidental.
So you’re too hip for Neil Gaiman. Got it.
Not exactly. My relationship to Neil Gaiman’s works is… complex. As is my relationship to Zelazny’s.
How hipster of you.
Look -
Neil and I agree on one thing: James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks is “probably the best book in the world.” Only one of us got to write the introduction to the reprint, though, so I doubt I can hurt him much. And he gets $45k for an hour of public speaking, which he has justified in such an awesomely unassailable way that I suggest you go read up on it. Truly. It’s some spectacular thinking and prose.
And the dude is a dreamer. That’s cool. I dig it. The world needs more dreamers. And everyone I know who has ever met him says he’s a totally awesome guy. I believe it.
but.
It’s not a big but. I haven’t read Neil Gaiman before, sort of.
sort of.
So like most men on the periphery of goth culture, I’ve dated girls who are obsessive over Mr. Gaiman to the point of scalpel-cut “Neil”s in their arms. I dated a girl who searched eBay every day for signed Neil Gaiman memorabilia and owned multiple copies of every single Sandman comic. And I had a girl who really wanted to date me who would routinely drive six hours or more to see him speak. My introduction to Neil Gaiman was not “here’s this author, he’s pretty good” it was “here is a living legend, you are not worthy to read his writ.”
Not sure how that’s Mr. Gaiman’s fault.
Totally isn’t. Like I said, my relationship is complex. There was a lot of weight on me the first time I read a Sandman comic and I was like, “eh.” Wasn’t brilliant, wasn’t life-changing. Certainly wasn’t worthy of lace-ringed portraits of the man on the bedroom wall.
You’re making that up.
I totally am. Call it a metaphor to communicate the Gaiman-crazy I’ve encountered. Anyway. Never finished any of the comics ‘cuz I just couldn’t give a shit. Wanted to - but couldn't. Saw Stardust and for the life of me can’t remember what it was about. Saw Coraline and remember it pleasantly but it made exactly zero impression on me. Wasn’t boring, wasn’t exciting, was kind of a test pattern.
Those are movies, not books.
Right. Anyway. Put it this way. I want to be heavily into Neil Gaiman. Seems like the dude deserves it. But I just can’t get into his stuff. There’s no point for me. It's bland.
Unlike a book that nobody’s heard of written by that dude with a funny name that’s oh-so-much better than American Gods, which won a Hugo, a Nebula, has been translated into 22 languages and sold a million copies.
Like I said. “complex.” Roger Zelazny wrote some of the books that blew off the top of my head when I was younger. Doesn’t mean they’re good - means that Zelazny wrote keys that precisely fit my lock. They might not fit yours. They didn’t fit a lot of people’s. But holy shit, when they fit.
He was also a family friend. Next door neighbor to people my parents have known for 50 years. I never met him - too young for the parties - but he’s always been a hero. And he’s never been easy to categorize. Bastard put guns in fantasy. Ancient Egyptian gods on space ships -
So that’s your problem! There aren’t enough space ships in American Gods!
Hardly. Zelazny wrote Creatures of Light and Darkness as an exercise in 1968. He never intended anybody to so much as read it, let alone get someone to publish it. He was talking about it at a party though and Lester Del Rey got wind of it and demanded to read it. Del Rey published it. That was one of three printings since 1969 - it’s a book that nobody’s read, nobody will read and that was never intended to be read by anyone. It’s fuckin’ weird. And he airballed the last chapter. But it’s a goddamn masterpiece.
No, shut up. CL&D is, at base level, a tale about deities so old they cease to be deities who end up on opposing sides when one of them gets uppity which leads to war and ruminations on the nature of divinity and mortality. So's American Gods. Beat for goddamn beat. There are plenty of characters in common. All (ALL) of the major spoilers are the same. There’s a dead wife that isn’t quite dead in both of them. Without getting spoillerific I can’t really get into it, but seriously. It’s the same goddamn book, except one of them is set on a Tattoine analog (7 years before Star Wars) and the other one is set in Wisconsin.
I’d much rather read about Wisconsin. At least it exists.
Sure. Most people would. The minute you go to another planet you cut your audience by 90 percent. CL&D has cyborgs and dimensional portals and shit in it, too. Some of it is written in verse. The last chapter is a stage play. It’s been suggested that Zelazny was amped up on speed when he wrote the thing - he could well have been, just one long meth-fueled blast at the Underwood. It’s stupid short. You can read it in an afternoon.
If you cut all the extraneous bullshit out of American Gods, you could read it in an afternoon, too.
A million copies, chief. 22 languages.
And I’m not gonna hurt those figures one iota so pass the mic.
The protagonist of American Gods, Shadow, is big on coin tricks. Sleight of hand so that the audience doesn’t see your subterfuge. The author of American Gods, Neil Gaiman, is also big on sleight of hand. The structure of AG relies on two simultaneous stories interspersed with “interludes” that mean fuckall to the story but exist mostly for atmosphere. Zelazny did that, too; the difference is, Zelazny wrote the shit down and then put it in a drawer because it didn’t fucking matter to the story he was telling. Gaiman shuffles it back into the deck so you don’t notice that
nothing.
fucking.
happens.
in.
this. book.
Story 1 is about an ex-con who hooks up with a grifter, sits on his ass and does what everyone else tells him. There’s a vague murder mystery in there that doesn’t matter. Any time the plot is advanced it’s advanced by sheer dumb luck that gets a wave-off at the end, a basic “fuck you” to anyone in the audience who might have noticed that if it weren’t for serendipity the plot would be a flatline from beginning to end.
Story 2 is about a bunch of gods that decide to go to war.
Story 1 is front and center. For ever. Story 2 is implied. It’s the “off-screen story.” We never get to see any of it happen. Instead, we get to watch the most passive protagonist in the history of protagonism.
Shadow is the most fucking inert lump of shit I have ever seen featured in a book. Fuckin’ Bella Swann does more to advance her own fate than Shadow ever does. The sum total of his positive actions - things he does on his own, without being pointed there by someone else, are as follows:
- learns coin tricks while in prison
- bets his life in a game of checkers for no goddamn reason
- buys a library book
- a really passively spoillerific thing in the epilogue (not to be confused with the postscript - this thing is so vegematic’d that the book has both)
At least in CL&D you follow the people who are actually doing something. And they’re fucking badass. Check it:
- Its rider was once a man. He is the one who is called the Steel General. That is not a suit of armor that he is wearing; it is his body. He has turned off most of his humanity for the duration of the trip, and he stares straight ahead past the scales like bronze oak leaves on the side of his mount’s neck. He holds four reins, each as thick as a strand of silk, on the fingertips of his left hand. He wears a ring of tanned human flesh on his little finger, because it would be senseless and noisy for him to wear metal jewelry. The flesh was once his; at least, it helped to surround him at one time long ago.
See, and that’s why it matters. Neil Gaiman read that and came up with American Gods. No, scratch that, ‘cuz the audiobook had an hour-long interview about American Gods after American Gods. Which started with the idea for two guys on a plane, one of which knew the other one but not the other way ‘round, and a mystery involving a car on a frozen lake. So Neil Gaiman took that trite piece of Lake Wobegon bullshit and interspersed it with CL&D happening off screen so that the audience didn’t even get to read it.
It’d be one thing if he’d just taken the ball and run with it - and actually write about “American Gods.” But he didn’t. He wrote about a boring mutherfucker with no initiative, no personality, no drive, no fucking hobbies who was off playing Rosencrantz & Gildenstern while CL&D was happening somewhere else.
But CL&D was out of print from 1992 until 2010 while HBO is in talks to turn American Gods into a TV show.
You are an angry, bitter person.
I'm disappointed. Deeply, aggressively disappointed. This shit is squarely in Gaiman's wheelhouse. The man walks on water. We have a common love of precisely this sort of material. He's written what amounts to an homage of one of my favorite books of all time. And the result is deeply, deeply mediocre.
I want to say that if I hadn't read CL&D 20-odd years ago and a number of times in between I'd have liked the book better. Thing is, I still wouldn't like it. Shadow would still be inert. The real story would still happen off-screen. And I'd still be reading several hundred pages of Wisconsin tedium that gets abruptly cancelled not by anything foreshadowed, not by anything related to what came before, but by sheer dumb out-of-the-blue misfortune.
It makes me hurt. It illustrates that you can get a lot farther in the literary world by paying lip service to something than you can by actually investigating it. And it illustrates that you'll get a lot further in the world by pandering than you will by swinging for the fences.
And the worst part is I don't think Neil Gaiman even knows he's pandering. He wrote this thing and thought "good enough" and the rest of the world lined up to congratulate him on his masterpiece when in fact, it's a pale echo of something pure that, outside of this snarky-ass review, will never be noticed by anyone. As far as most of the world is concerned, the only thing Zelazny ever added to the pantheon is the fact that one of his books was the basis of the script used to launch Argo, and even that's only known to true aggro nerds. Shit, the only book of his that got a movie treatment ended up starring Jan Michael Vincent.
Stay on target, gold leader.
Right. So this is a book that's kind of okay that everyone thinks is fucking brilliant when, in my opinion, it's a pale imitation of the book it could have been. Should have been. Could easily have been. Written by a guy who should have been able to get the touchdown and the extra point. And nobody seems to have noticed that he fumbled the ball at his own 20, which fundamentally challenges my understanding of football (and stretches the definition of "metaphor").
Say something nice.
I’m delighted to find out that my ex-girlfriend-driven aversion to Neil Gaiman has not deprived me of much lo these many years.
NEXT UP:
good question. Maybe the Poisonwood Bible - probably be a good lead-in to Fordlandia, which I've been meaning to read for years. I really wanted to do Godel Escher Bach but you can’t even get that shit on kindle. I cranked through half this book on audio today, just doin’ my thing. Sitting down and reading paper? Hell, I barely have time to do that on the crapper anymore.
Completely irrelevant to this discussion, but kleinbl00 I just want you to know that I fully expect your next series (after this review one, and yes, you're having another series) to be titled "bl00's clues".
It's not that I disagree with what you've written, so much as I fail to see why it amounts to a criticism. Plenty of good novels, and even some great ones, feature passive protagonists where events don't go anywhere. I am not a Gaiman devotee. My impression of the Sandman comics is that if you didn't read them as a teenager in the 90s you're never going to appreciate them. I didn't, so I don't. Be that as it may, from the few titles of his I have read it's pretty clear that Gaiman's strength really does just lie in evoking a certain sort of atmosphere. In that respect I think your dismissal of AG as simply being a bad Zelazny rip-off sells it short. Gaiman wants to paint for us a picture of what it would be like if the gods of old Europe washed up as refugees in America. Shadow is the Dante or Josef K dragged through the milieu, bearing witness for the reader. To that extent I suppose any journey he goes on is largely an internal one. Be that as it may, the Shadow we meet at the end of American Gods is convincingly different from the one we meet at the start. I promise to keep an eye out for Creatures of Light & Darkness, though.
As one of the three people you mentioned, damn do I appreciate this. I read American Gods first, and thought it was clever and atmospheric at the time. I still think it's atmospheric, but all the cleverness was merely implied. (If you want good Gaiman, go watch Neverwhere. He wrote it for BBC 2 and it's aimed at adults - I liked it far better than anything else of his I've encountered.) CL&D was flawed, but it was flawed out of ambition and daring. American Gods was flawed out of shallowness - it merely left me thinking "something was very clever there", and when I stopped to find it I realized it was all smoke and mirrors. I wish it would share a bit of it's fame with deeper, more worthwhile books. Of course, I'm biased. Zelazny fits me perfectly also, and I've never found anyone quite like him. Kerouac does sci-fi, maybe. If I wanted to read a great work about flawed and mortal gods I'd go back to Lord of Light.
Most of the point of view characters in Sandman were the same way. He does it a lot. It makes less sense in Neverwhere though, because Door isn't any more alien than most fantasy protagonists. He didn't really need to add someone for you to relate to.
This is very true - I mentioned it because most of his other "cinematic" works like Coraline are aimed at children. I just looked into other novels by him to recommend something, and struck out. Good Omens was a lot of fun, but rather different than his other work. I had no idea how little he'd actually written for adult novels!
I have to find a place to use this in my paper.So Neil Gaiman took that trite piece of Lake Wobegon bullshit...
So was The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul. But it was cleverer. I haven't read Creatures of Light and Darkness but I have heard of it so I guess I count as one of the three, maybe. I will now read it, however. I like to read. I will also find The 13 Clocks. (EDIT: is this it in its entirety? Looks to be.) ...shows what I know because when I saw you were going to be talking about American Gods I figured my reading list would be safe because I've already read American Gods.No, shut up. CL&D is, at base level, a tale about deities so old they cease to be deities who end up on opposing sides when one of them gets uppity which leads to war and ruminations on the nature of divinity and mortality. So's American Gods. Beat for goddamn beat.
Don't read that. You need the illustrations. 13 clocks is an illustrated novel and the illustrations are fucking sublime. Hit the library if need be. I've given out 13 clocks as a christmas gift a few times. It was a major part of my childhood, and is, in my opinion, the standard against which all 'once upon a time' stories are to be judged. I'm a Douglas Adams fan, but the Dirk Gently stuff, as with most of his stuff, was comedy first, metaphor second. He was certainly clever. He was not, however, a starer-into-the-Abyss, more of a smug glancer if you will. American Gods assumes the cloak of allegory; Teatime was kind of more of a political cartoon. (CL&D is one of those crazy fever dreams you get when you've both drunk too much and smoked too much pot all at once, except that it lingers with you and won't go away once you've sobered up)
Okay, thanks. Will do. Yes, although his glances should be given a lot more credit than they are. The first Dirk Gently had the most moving passages on extinction I've ever read, because of their context in a comedy.Don't read that. You need the illustrations. 13 clocks is an illustrated novel and the illustrations are fucking sublime. Hit the library if need be. I've given out 13 clocks as a christmas gift a few times. It was a major part of my childhood, and is, in my opinion, the standard against which all 'once upon a time' stories are to be judged.
I'm a Douglas Adams fan, but the Dirk Gently stuff, as with most of his stuff, was comedy first, metaphor second. He was certainly clever. He was not, however, a starer-into-the-Abyss, more of a smug glancer if you will. American Gods assumes the cloak of allegory; Teatime was kind of more of a political cartoon.
Agreed. I think the problem with Douglas Adams is he just didn't know how to frame things in a way that didn't get dismissed as trite. Jonathan Swift had the same problem; nobody got the comedy in "A Modest Proposal" so they sure as shit didn't get the political message.
Maybe he didn't live long enough to make the transition from pure comedy to writing something else. In a lot of his essays and letters he showed a sublime, tragic understanding of the world which reminded me of some of the greatest novelists of the late 19th/early 20th century. Last Chance To See was a start.
Bump it up if you can. It's heartbreaking, and it doesn't feel anything like Adam's books. Honestly, it feels like a conversation with the man himself - it's witty in an offhand, unstructured way. It's sad and beautiful and doesn't have the "pat" feel that gets some much of the rest written off as juvenile.
Not only have I read them, I was approached by a studio to adapt them back in 2008. Turns out they not only didn't have the rights, they hadn't even tried to get them. So i did, using the family angle. Turns out things are complex; Roger and his wife divorced not long before he died and I didn't get far. For a while I had an animator who was interested in doing For a Breath I tarry as CG, but then his dad died and he got drafted. The first five books are great. It kinda goes downhill from there. Edit: As it turns out, you weren't talking to me. NVM!
As long as I'm correct and we're talking within the context of the Amber books (look, it's early, my eyes are blurry, if I'm wrong just tell me), I would read at least until Book 5. After that, comme ci, comme ca. You might get mildly frustrated with them? But it would be a mild frustration, I think, nothing more, and I don't think they (the latter 5) would negate your enjoyment of the first five.
What I mean is, since my default is obviously to read them, will they negate my enjoyment of the first five in some way. I read fast so I don't care if they don't add a single iota of enjoyment to the series as long as they don't ruin it too.
I was curious anyway but figured you probably had. I was given an omnibus edition by a manboy who also gave me the entirety of Game of Thrones (that had been written at that point) and also a book called The Lies of Locke Lamorra. I agree with your assessment about Amber, although because I was given the anthology it took me a while to realize they actually were separate book-books. I think Amber is the only Zelazny's I've read unless I've happened across short stories in odd places. Edit: it's super cool you knew/know the Zelazny clan.
If you dig American Gods, you'll either dig the shit out of Zelazny's other stuff or you'll hate the fuck out of it. Go give For A breath I Tarry a shot. If that works for you, try Isle of the Dead. Then try Creatures of Light and Darkness. The book that should have been made into a movie was Damnation Alley. It's fuckin' Road Warrior. It's about a biker named Hell Tanner who is the only guy in Los Angeles who has successfully crossed post-nuclear Armageddon America to Boston, so he gets a reprieve from jail in order to lead an expedition trying to get plague vaccine there. Planes don't work because nuclear war fucked up the atmosphere so much that the sky is full of hurricane-force winds that constantly drop shit on the plains. That's a young adult novel written in 1967. Hollywood turned it into this:
I'm curious as to the relevance of your description of the manboy. I guess you were talking to me as well -- I haven't read the Chronicles of Amber. I have read Song of Ice and Fire, and I think I read Locke Lamora at some point. I started reading fantasy very, very young, so by the age of ten I had mostly jetted through the famous stuff, which is both good and bad.
The word was originally lover but I didn't like that. While running the risk of sounding something - not quite sure what, romantic? Young? Once-idealistic? - he and I were many things to each other over a long period of time, but most of those things were never labelled. I was going to say "defined," but then - rhyme.
I haven't the slightest clue what the word lover means. I remember getting a Valentine's Day card from a sort-of girlfriend once -- I was like 15, we didn't do much more than make out, surely -- where she had found a 'friendship' card, crossed out 'friend' and written 'lover' instead. I was like, we are? Are we? What's that mean? Was confused and worried for ten seconds and then went back to video games or whatever 15 year olds do. Anyway. Manboy was a fun choice.