DE: There are short stories throughout American
Gods. Were they written separately or during the
course of the rest of the book?
NG: They were written during the writing of the
whole book. Normally I would write them when I got
stuck and I couldn't figure out what Shadow was to do
next.
DE: I enjoyed the cab driver one the best.
NG: I loved all of them. The best thing about the
cab driver was just the sheer joy of putting myself
into somebody else's head and building a story. I
loved the fact that it was a story essentially about
this young homosexual Arab, terrified and having a
rotten time on the streets of New York City.
DE: Was that autobiographical at all?
NG: Well, speaking as a heterosexual Jew who always
has a lovely time in New York, no. [laughs] But I'm
always impressed by the bigness of New York and the
capacity of big cities to eat people.
I did those stories because they were things I
always wanted to do, like genies and I wanted to make
that work. He was a homosexual because he needed to be
to make the story work. I couldn't make the scene work
in the same way with a female cab driver, and it
certainly wouldn't have worked if he was a woman.
Those short stories were such fun. America
produced, as one of its folk arts since the 1930's --
Hemingway, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard and a bunch of
other people -- a very stripped down prose. Some
people describe it as invisible prose but I don't
think it is. I describe it as meat and potatoes prose.
It was nothing very fancy and it got the job done.
Really straightforward. So a really conscious decision
when I started American Gods in the short
stories was a chance to cut loose, to be able to write
the story in the voice of 18th century criminals or
Iron Age men crossing the landscape from Siberia to
Alaska. It allowed me a strangeness, a distance and a
magic that I was not allowing myself in the prose of
the rest of the book.
It's weird now with the paperback because it's
really selling well. On the one hand it’s nominated
for all of these awards like the Hugo and the Bram
Stoker Award, which is lovely. But it’s also being
marketed to the world as a thriller. When you pick up
the mass-market paperback there's no mention that it's
a fantasy book anywhere. There's a lightning bolt on
the cover with a road and it says “New York Times
bestseller” and that's it. In hardcover, people
bought it because they knew my name or read a review,
but in paperback people are picking it up because the
cover looks cool or it’s on the bestseller racks.
People are going to be reading it and halfway through
they will realize it's a fantasy or a horror novel.
DE: In the book, Shadow is contacted through I
Love Lucy and Lucy offers to show him her tits.
Did you sit there while you were watching TV and
wonder what Lucille Ball's tits looked like?
NG: No, when I was a kid in England they never
showed I Love Lucy. What they showed was The
Lucy Show; she was in her mid fifties when that
show was on. So you did not look at this woman and
want to see her naked. You look at this woman and
think why did they give her this show week after week?
Why does her boss hate her so much?
Now, Elizabeth Montgomery [of Bewitched
fame] was a different story. To a nine year-old you
just sit there trying to figure out who you are going
to marry when you grow up: Elizabeth Montgomery,
Carolyn Jones [Morticia Addams] or Diana Rigg [Emma
Peel of The Avengers]. You knew the perfect
woman triangulated among those three. What did
Samantha from Bewitched see in that guy with
the weird jaw? He's boring.
I once wrote a song that didn't work but it never
got further than the first verse. It’s called Old
Nick at Nite.
DE: How's that go?
NG: I think like this:
I watched the Dick Van Dyke Show and I saw
Rob get drunk and he punched out Mary Tyler Moore.
Lucy slit her wrists and over on Bewitched I
saw Darren going down on Endora.
All the late night gods are behaving kind of odd;
it's a scary kind of place to be.
The devil's in the details; it's old Nick at Nite,
it’s something like a drug for me.
DE: [Clapping]
NG: I thought there we go, that's a great first
verse, now I'll write the rest of it but I never could
really be bothered because I had already done all the
fun ones. That wasn't much of a song anyway. When it
came to write that part of American Gods that
song was haunting the back of my head.
DE: Do you have any good book tour stories? I saw
you in Huntington out on Long Island.
NG: The tour was actually fun. Huntington was like
the second stop. I was still human at that point. I
flew from New York to Chicago for two signings. The
last Chicago signing finished at midnight and then I
got into a car and got to Kentucky by 5 am. I slept
for a few hours, then signed and then went on to
Dayton, Ohio.
The big problem with the whole tour was exemplified
in Dayton. It was my first book with HarperCollins;
they had bought Avon, my previous publisher. They
didn't quite get how many people show up at my
signings. At the time I was unable to persuade the
publisher to start the tour in New York. They said,
"No, we just had a New York Times bestselling
author do a signing in New York and hardly anyone
showed up. So we want you to go someplace where we
know you'll get a crowd." I said that would not
be a problem.
DE: You didn't say, "Do you know who I
am?"
NG: Well, the weirdness of being me is that people
come out in numbers that would normally suit Anne Rice
or Stephen King. I love it but I wish I sold their
numbers. I tried to explain that most of them would be
five-hour signings. By the time we got to Dayton the
signings were scheduled fairly early in the evening
and they made dinner reservations for me at 9 pm,
which get blown. We finished at about 11:20 after 6
hours of signing and discovered that after 11 pm
there's nothing to eat in Dayton Ohio. So we head back
to the hotel where there is a Shriner's convention and
a wedding going on.
Officially they have room service until 11:30 and
we put in our order at 11:25. My publisher, her
assistant and me are waiting, and strange things start
happen. A couple in the room next to us ask if they
could borrow our room for sex, thus getting me on some
shriner shit list forever I'm sure. We keep phoning
room service and they keep saying to be patient and
finally at 1 am, I demand that they bring the food.
They say that they tried to bring it and nobody came
to the door. I said, no, this did not happen, we've
been sitting here hungry. They brought it up and it
was this food that was two hours old. We're chewing
these cold fries and I thought, "This is the
glamorous life." By 2:30 I was asleep and at 4:30
we had to get up to fly to Cleveland.
DE: Nothing to eat there either.
NG: Nothing to eat but I did get to sleep. And then
did an interview and a signing. Then going to Seattle
we changed planes in Minneapolis where I met my wife
in the airport and had time to give her a hug and a
kiss, and hand her my dirty laundry in exchange for
new laundry.
There weren't any goofy stories. One of the things
that weirds out the stores is that they are always
expecting to be very scared. And then people show up
who look scary because they're wearing not very much
or all black or interesting piercings and tattoos.
Then they're lovely people. The store managers always
say, "They're so nice." As if I personally
went out and handpicked them. I talk to people like
Clive [Barker] or Stephen [King] and they have the
crazies that want them to sign in their blood or go to
live in their attics or offer them cut-off catheads. I
never get that.
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