Anansi Boys Review – Rocky Mountain News
From today’s Rocky Mountain News.
Neil Gaiman’s amazing and expansive American Gods is the only novel ever to win Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker awards. The book was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and deserved to win that one, as well. Now Gaiman, of Sandman comic-book fame, looks at the old gods from a more humorous viewpoint in Anansi Boys.
Gaiman’s own description of the novel is hard to beat: “It’s a scary, funny sort of a story, which isn’t exactly a thriller, and isn’t really horror, and doesn’t quite qualify as a ghost story (although it has at least one ghost in it) or a romantic comedy (although there are several romances in there, and it’s certainly a comedy, except for the scary bits). If you have to classify it, it’s probably a magical-horror-thriller-ghost-rom- antic-comedy-family-epic, although that leaves out the detective bits and much of the food.”
Fat Charlie Nancy wasn’t fat anymore. He’d been pudgy as a boy, and his father had gifted him with the awful nickname. When Mr. Nancy gave someone a name it stuck, because, in addition to being Charlie’s dad, Mr. Nancy was a god. More specifically, he was Anansi, the trickster god who first brought stories to earth. Sometimes Anansi is a spider, sometimes a man and, sometimes, something in between.
The story opens as Fat Charlie attends his father’s funeral. There, he learns that he has a brother he never knew who inherited all of his father’s magic, and if Charlie ever needs his brother, to tell a spider.
Sure enough, on his return to England, Charlie’s life becomes so complicated that he tells a spider, half in jest – and when the brothers get together, the fun begins.
What follows is Gaiman at his best, with the Anansi boys falling in and out of love, running from the law, visiting with all the old gods their father has tricked in the past and learning what family is all about.
I hope the author’s trophy case has an empty shelf, because, at the end of the year, the awards should come rolling in again.
–Mark Graham
The Rocky Mountain News also has information on the Tattered Cover signing in Denver on September 27th.