4.2 stars.

I couldn’t decide how I felt about the book right until I finished it. There were moments I was considering putting it down, because the pacing seemed to get interrupted by these interludes that I just wanted to rush through to get back to the main plot line.

However, I’m glad I forced myself to slow down and appreciate novel, especially the interludes. They were eerie and haunting with their historical familiarity mixed with a mythological presence that permeates the entire novel.

This story is not one to be rushed through and devoured. It intentionally seems to be a collection of vignettes across the United States set against a humming tension akin to the opening to “Something Wicked This Way Comes” by Ray Bradbury. The summer is hot, there is an excited quality to the whole event, a fascination with the carnival coming to town, but also a clawing sense of wrongness, something is off but the harder you try to look at it the more it seems to disappear into the background. As different characters warn our protagonist(?) throughout the story: “There is a storm coming”. You can feel the electric anticipation and you find yourself bracing yourself for the first bolt of lightning to shoot out of the climactic pages.

The inclusion of the multiple mythologies was fascinating to me as well, and Gaiman seemed not to only lean on the popular ones from Western tradition either. Our main character, Shadow, was an interesting and passive character through which to immerse the reader in the reality and unreality happening around him.

I might read this again just to catch some interesting tidbits and imagery I may have missed the first time.