American Gods

[shavedape]

Starz announced back in mid-June that they are making a series out of Neil Gaiman's book American Gods. Oddly enough I'm reading this book right now. It's interesting, fascinating and bizarre as hell. (I'm dying to see how they do the I Love Lucy segment.)

So, anyone else read the book and/or going to watch the series? Just curious.

http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/neil-gaiman-american-gods-bryan-fuller-starz-1201520765/

 

[Overmind One]

Starz announced back in mid-June that they are making a series out of Neil Gaiman's book American Gods. Oddly enough I'm reading this book right now. It's interesting, fascinating and bizarre as hell. (I'm dying to see how they do the I Love Lucy segment.)

So, anyone else read the book and/or going to watch the series? Just curious.

http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/neil-gaiman-american-gods-bryan-fuller-starz-1201520765/

Read the article at your link. I am unfamiliar with this series/story/epic. Is it any good? What would you compare it to?

 

[ecgordon]

http://templetongate.net/americangods.htm

 

[Joelist]

Seems like a weird sort of fantasy.

For stuff in this general vein I prefer books like Swan's Song:

 

[shavedape]

Read the article at your link. I am unfamiliar with this series/story/epic. Is it any good? What would you compare it to?

It's kind of hard to compare it to something because it's so bizarre. I'm only halfway through the book right now so I'm not sure how to describe it properly. It's like the gods of old have fallen on hard times and have been eclipsed by new gods, like the god of TV, etc.

It's good that the show is being done by a premium cable channel because that way they can be fairly graphic with the content. If it was done on a commercial channel it would no doubt be watered down and attenuated which would be boring.

As I understand it Neil Gaiman himself will be writing several episodes of the first season. Hopefully that means the TV show will hue closely to the book instead of going off on some dumb tangents.

 

[shavedape]

Well I finished the novel. I would say that it was an okay read. Gaiman really needs some editors that actually edit instead of being fanboiz and fangurlz of the author. I'm not talking spelling errors, but there were some grammatical annoyances. More importantly the book was over-written in the most nonsensical areas. Due to this it plods and gets boring at times. And the areas where he should have expounded upon certain characters and situations he doesn't deliver. It often felt like a satisfying moment was just around the corner but the corner was never turned.

The problem is this guy gives us a huge pantheon (pantheons) of gods in modern America but then he only gives us glimpses into a few of them, that's it. Due to this the climax is a bit anti-climatic.

And the main character of "Shadow", while sympathetic at times, is mostly wasted throughout the majority of the book. That said, I can see them making this into an episodic show. If we're fortunate they will fix some of the problems that the book has.