American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition (Author’s Preferred Text)

An Interview with Neil Gaiman

Which godlike powers would you like to posses?

I want to make time stretchier. I would like much more rubbery days, and I just wish that you could lean on a week, and sort of push the walls out a bit, and suddenly about nineteen extra days would rush in to fill the vacuum.

There is not enough time, and I wind up just wanting to do things that I don’t have time for. There are so many things that I’d love to do, and I have to put off, or that it’s a matter of me choosing, when really I’d love to do both. And if only time were infinitely stretchy, I could.

What is your favorite roadside attraction?

The House on the Rock in American Gods actually is real. Most people think I made it up, whereas in actual fact I just toned it down a bit so that people would believe it. Because being a real place it has no obligation to be likely. So I left out the 120-piece robot orchestra and other stuff.

I remember, the first time I went to The House on the Rock, thinking, I just don’t believe this place, and the second time I went to The House on the Rock still not believing this place. Then I had to go back for Entertainment Weekly to take my photograph standing beside the largest carousel in the world.

It was the single loudest photo session I’ve ever had because they actually pitch the volume of the mechanical instruments in that room in order to keep people moving through. You’re not really meant to linger too long by the largest carousel in the world.

The photo session went on for several hours and the photographer was communicating with me entirely by hand gestures. He would tap his chin and point up so that I’d know to look up a bit.

How did you find out about it?

Like most roadside attractions in America, they have signposts for it that start about 300 miles away, and imply it’s just around the corner. I’d seen all these signs saying THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK, and thought it was very near where I lived, and eventually discovered it was 250 miles away.

On the other hand, Rock City, which is also in American Gods, is worse, because I saw my first signpost to SEE ROCK CITY, THE WORLD’S WONDER driving through mountainous Tennessee or Kentucky or somewhere, and again assumed it was just around the corner, and then drove for the greater part of a day.

And then of course, because it’s almost impossible to get to once you’re there, I drove straight past it. Then I drove back and checked it out, and decided it was going to be in my book.

What was your strangest plane journey?

The trouble with plane journeys is you start folding them all together. I do remember one which was not necessarily my strangest plane journey, but had something I’ve never seen happen before or since.

I’d just been served with a large cup of apple juice and the plane hit one of those air pockets and dropped several hundred feet. It didn’t bother any of us because we were all seat belted in, but my apple juice shot straight out of my cup. The cup remained in the same place, but the contents made a slow and incredibly graceful arc across the cabin and landed in a businessman’s lap half an airplane away.

I was with Dave McKean at the time on a Mr. Punch signing tour and we tried to pretend it wasn’t us. At least they knew we hadn’t actually thrown it; it was the apple juice that made a mad leap for freedom.

What’s your favorite coin trick?

The favorite coin trick I’ve ever done was when I started work on American Gods and I had a large notebook, a fountain pen, and a copy of Bobo’s Modern Coin Magic.

I went from one to the other and I spent days practicing my French Drop and my Downs Palm and all of those things because I knew Shadow was going to be into coin magic and I felt that I had to be able to write about it reasonably convincingly. I’d never done any magic before but I decided I had to now.

I was actually on a train across America, going to San Diego, and there was a ten-year-old girl traveling with her mother. We’d all been on this train now for about three days so we all knew each other, and I disappeared a coin for her rather unexpectedly and reappeared it from her ear. I don’t think anybody had ever done anything like that for her and seeing the expression on her face left me understanding why people become magicians.

I of course have never become a magician, but I get to hang around with the Penn and Tellers and the Derren Browns of this world, who are all very, very good people and who will humor me and treat me like one of their own although they know that really I’m not.

Favorite con artist or con trick?

Ponzi, who created the Ponzi scheme. The thing that people laugh at in terms of confidence tricks is somebody selling you the Brooklyn Bridge, or in England somebody selling you London Bridge, or in France somebody selling you the Eiffel Tower.

Ponzi sold the Eiffel Tower by going to all the major scrap metal agents in France, presenting himself as a representative of the French government, and explaining that the Eiffel Tower had become unsafe and they were going to be scrapping it, but they needed somebody who could handle the dismantling of the tower and the volume of metal that this would generate. He also implied that the French government was going to be so grateful that there would probably be all sorts of decorations involved for anybody who took this on.

And then he explained to each of them in turn that it was a sealed envelope bid, so there was no possibility for corruption. So they went off to prepare their bids, and he privately got in touch with each of these gentleman and explained that he could be bribed. And each of them gave him vast sums of money in order to buy the Eiffel Tower. And that, I feel, is still my favorite con.

Did you enjoy making up the con tricks in American Gods?

I did enjoy making up the con tricks very much, although I have to say I found myself rather baffled. The one that I thought you could actually do I tried to sort of fuzz the edges of a bit, so the reader can’t actually figure out exactly how things work with Mr. Wednesday and the credit cards. What he did is doable but I fuzzed the edges so the reader can’t do it.

But I was very proud of myself for coming up with the ATM card night deposit con. I made that up, and I thought it was really funny until the phone rang about eighteen months ago and it was a reporter from Canada letting me know that somebody who was a fan of the book had just done it and was now on the run, having taken local merchants for $30,000.

You don’t expect your readers to go, “Ah this book’s not just a fine work of literary whatshisname, but also a get-rich-quick scheme,” to be followed shortly by a go-to-prison-quick scheme, which I believe he did.

Are there any myths you would like to dispel?

I have my journal over at www.neilgaiman.com, and one of the reasons for having it, apart from the fact that it’s incredibly useful to have an immediate plug-in to your readers, is that I used to turn up at signings and people would expect me to be characters that I’d created. Particularly the Sandman.

So I’d turn up to the signing and see the disappointment on people’s faces because I wasn’t tall and pale and beautiful and very morbid. They expected me to speak in gnomic gothic sentences and possibly iambic pentameter, or triolets or something.

I like the blog because it undercuts and dispels that. I don’t think you can imagine somebody as a beautiful gothic figure if they’ve just written about clearing up cat vomit from the floor at three o’clock in the morning.

It’s now a few years since American Gods came out. Do you have any thoughts on the novel?

People were incredibly nice about American Gods. I never expected all the awards that it won, particularly when it won the Hugo, and the Nebula, and the Bram Stoker award—that was delightful. And Americans were terribly nice about it. Nobody actually did the whole “How dare you, being English, write about America?” which I thought was kind of them.

The thing I found really amusing was about some places in the middle where people are talking in the way they talk in Wisconsin and Minnesota: occasionally I would have New Yorkers and Los Angelinos accusing me of lapsing into Briticisms there, mostly I think because people have no idea what people talk like in the rest of their country.