American Gods/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Non Sequitur Scene: The cutaway chapters. Did we really need to know about the Man-eating hooker goddess and the Ifrit and the taxi driver? Don't forget Laura applying for a Job literally Just for Pun.
  • Fridge Brilliance: When you realize that the word "Wednesday" is derived from "Odin's Day", and learn that Mr. Wednesday is Odin.
  • Genius Bonus: Anyone who knows the origins of the names of the days of the week (etc. "Friday is Freyja's day") can figure out Mr. Wednesday's real identity pretty quickly.
    • Not only that, but in general the more mythology you know the more you will get. In a book that explicitly contains Norse gods it would be unusual for there to be two redheads with scarred lips, eh?
  • Nightmare Fuel: Sweet lord, Hinzelmann. The story of the tribe that creates its own god from a murdered child, who in turn, a few thousand years later, settles down in Lakeside and kills another child each year.
  • Spiritual Successor: A non-comedy successor to Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.
  • Squick: Many examples: a man eaten by a vagina, the man-eating goddess being ground into a bloody smear by a limousine, almost any scene in the last half of the book involving Laura...
    • Media taking over Lucille Ball's image on an episode of I Love Lucy and offering to show Shadow Lucy's breasts. Thankfully, Shadow turns the television off before she can do it.