American Daleks

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Neil Gaiman’s remarkable novel American Gods, a road-trip, murder-mystery, missing-identity, conspiracy, hustling, stranger-comes-to-a-small-town, Götterdämmerung of a fantasy. For me, it’s a pair with Diana Wynne Jones’ Eight Days of Luke – the grown-up, explicit, visceral, wry, partially-unrecommendable-in-certain-circles elder sibling of a novel with many of the same themes (as Stardust pairs with Howl’s Moving Castle). And in my head it is more than one book and world, as fits a cross-country novel in such a broad country – cold isolation of an ex-con walking by train tracks, hot southern funeral parlours, sweat and loss of hotel rooms, the baroque horror of a carousel…

In other news: A month and a half until I go to America! A little freaked out. Reminding myself that all I need is a passport, credit card and the will to eat my way across a continent.