American Gods - Influences

Influences

The novel's dedication reads "For absent friends – Kathy Acker and Roger Zelazny and all points in between".

Various real-life towns and tourist attractions, including the House on the Rock (and its 'world's largest carousel') and Rock City, are featured through the course of the book. Gaiman states in an introduction that he has obscured the precise location of some actual locales.

According to Gaiman, American Gods is not based on Diana Wynne Jones's Eight Days of Luke, "although they bear an odd relationship, like second cousins once removed or something". When working on the structure of a story linking gods and days of the week, he realized that this idea had already been used in Eight Days of Luke. He abandoned the story, but later used the idea when writing American Gods to depict Wednesday and Shadow meeting on the god's namesake day.

About John James's novel Votan, Gaiman stated: “I think probably the best book ever done about the Norse was a book that I couldn’t allow myself to read between coming up with the idea of American Gods and finishing it. After it was published I actually sat down and allowed myself to read it for the first time in 15 years and discovered it was just as good as I thought it was”.

Gaiman's subsequent novel Anansi Boys was actually conceived before American Gods, and shares a character, Mr. Nancy. It is not a sequel but could possibly be of the same fictional world. Although Anansi the spider god of African legend appears in both American Gods and Anansi Boys, implying a connection, one of Neil Gaiman's signature touches is the use of allusion, both to works by other authors and to mechanics and themes used in his own books. Though some elements from American Gods are mentioned in Anansi Boys (such as Nancy telling a group of women that he fought in a war), none of the gods of the latter mention the importance of people's belief in them, and only deities of African and Caribbean folktales are seen or mentioned. The novella, "Monarch of the Glen" (from the Legends II anthology, later collected in Fragile Things), continues Shadow's journeys. This latter anthology also features the characters of Mr. Alice and Mr. Smith, a pair of dubious men who also appeared in a Gaiman short story called "Keepsakes and Treasures", suggesting that this tale is a part of the American Gods universe as well.

The novel also shares a number of themes and images with Gaiman's graphic novel series The Sandman. For instance, in American Gods Shadow dreams of thunderbirds and a mountain of bones. Similarly, in The Sandman's "A Dream of a Thousand Cats" a cat speaks of a dream in which she is wandering a mountain of bones and being circled by a bird similar in description to the thunderbirds of American Gods. One of the deities who Wednesday tries to persuade into fighting is also described similarly to The Sandman's character Delirium.