America is no place for a divinity. Our soil isn’t fertile that way — myths don’t thrive the way they did in the old world. Reading American Gods, you can see why it takes a foreigner — Gaiman’s a Brit — to see what is invisible to the natives: the old deities scratching out a seedy living all around us — Norse, Slavic, Irish, Egyptian, voodoo, Egyptian — brought over by generations of immigrants and then left to die. Together they re-enact the old myths here on our barren soil, and Gaiman shows us that, even here, they still have their old power.
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