YMMV / American Gods

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • The House on the Rock is a real place in southern Wisconsin and is, if anything, even weirder than described in the book.
  • Rock City. The easiest way to shock a British reader of the book is to inform them that the place actually exists, kitschy barnside signs and all.
• Arc Fatigue: A large chunk of act two is Shadow just aimlessly milling around Lakeside with no real plot advancements barring Wednesday occasionally popping up and enlisting him to assist in the recruitment of another God.
• Broken Base: Gaiman notes in the 10th Anniversary edition how this is one of his most controversial books. Many fans find Shadow too unlikable and the plot too wandering, but many others consider the book to be quite good and don't mind the wandering plot. As he puts it, the people who like the book really like it, and the people who hate the book really hate it.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: In hindsight, the fact that Low-Key Lyesmith is Loki is ridiculously obvious and many readers (as well as Shadow) kick themselves for not seeing it sooner. (To people who first listen to the audiobook it may well be so obvious it's barely a reveal at all, given that when you say it loud you can tell immediately what it sounds just like.)
• Designated Villain: Audrey Burton is depicted as a Hysterical Woman for daring to be upset that her best friend had a years-long affair with her husband.
• Ending Fatigue: Some releases of the book just keep going. Depending on the release, the plot can be followed with two epilogues and a continuation through a spin-off short story. Firstly, the named "Epilogue" chapters appear to tie up the remaining loose ends and character threads; the "Post Script" chapter, which sees Shadow visit Reykjavik and briefly chat with the original incarnation of Odin; and then, in some releases, a few chapters that see Shadow visiting Scotland and taking on a single job.
• Epileptic Trees: The forgettable god who leaves "an impression of wealth", by his very nature, is basically fertilizer for this trope. The most popular theories are that he's Hades/Pluto, Mercury/Hermes, Budha, or Kubera.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Anyone who knows the origins of the names of the days of the week (etc. "Friday is Frigga'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. For instance, when Shadow asks Loki why he's with the new gods, when he was part of Odin's pantheon, Loki responds that they were never very close. In the myths, Odin and Loki were blood brothers and knowing that indicates that Loki is lying and still on Odin's side.
  • Hinzelmann is based on the legend of a kobold named Heinzelmann, whose true form was of a small child with two swords impaled in his body. Also, it was said that if he was ever chased out of his house, evil luck would follow. In the end, it's implied without Hinzelmann alive the town of Lakeside will no longer be the idyllic, slice-of-heaven town it is now.
• Harsher in Hindsight: There are far far fewer buildins in Cairo, IL since the book came out.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Technical Boy is always seen smoking a cigarette that is described as giving an odor of "burned electronic components". Years later, electronic cigarettes and vaping became a major fad, including in the tech crowd... and sure enough, the TV series' incarnation of TB has a vape pen.
  • The pseudonym Shadow adopts in the second act is Mike Ainsel- Ainsel sounding almost phonetically identical to "incel". Which becomes hilarious once you remember the deurotagonist of this arc is called Chad...
• Jerkass Woobie: Even Shadow feels a little sorry for the Technical Boy in the Hell Hotel.
• Magnificent Bastard: Mr. Wednesday, in truth the god Odin, is the architect of a great deal of misfortune in the story to feed his purposes. Wednesday arranges the death of hero Shadow's wife to recruit Shadow to his purposes, later revealing that Wednesday is Shadow's father, having sired him and manipulated Shadow's life for decades so Shadow could serve his purposes. With his power waning in America next to the new Gods, Wednesday engineers a war between gods and an ongoing conflict to trick them into a huge battle so Wednesday can harvest their power for his purposes. Wednesday remains charismatic and charming, despite his vicious cunning, still caring about Shadow at the end, even as he attempts to ascend to greater heights at the cost of old gods and new alike.
• Narm:
  • In the 10th-anniversary edition audiobook version of American Gods, Mad Sweeney's Final Speech is ruined for Jewish viewers because the way he pronounces "boobies" is identical to the Yiddish bubby, or grandmother. What kind of fortune teller would let an old drunken leprechaun play with her grandmothers? Perhaps he just really Likes Older Women...
  • This audiobook in particular has some bad moments, including Bilquis' line delivery in general. She has a bad over-the-top hiss, an unidentifiable fake accent, and sounds more like an extremely bad attempt at a campy 60's Catwoman than she really should.
  • The audiobook version take most of the pun-filled aliases from quite translucent to "you were trying to hide something?" level. "Low-Key" and "Jaquel" specifically, as they are pronounced identically to "Loki" and "Jackal".
  • The protagonist being called "Shadow Moon". Perhaps acceptable in a fantasy setting, and it worked better on original printing where he could plausibly have been a late hippie kid, but given that he uses it in contemporary America without anyone ever questioning it (bar a single instance where the questionee says she likes the name anyway), you're left wondering if he's going to say "Nothing personal, kid" or something equally edgy at some point.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • 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.
  • The idea of the New Gods. The Internet and the media have become necessities in our everyday lives, and have grown in their influence since the book was published. So the idea that they're personified as Jerkass Gods is quite discomforting. Hell, this wiki could potentially allow Media to spy on us.
• The Scrappy: For some, Shadow himself, for being a Vanilla Protagonist with no motivation or agency. He also has a very silly name.
• Squick: Many examples.
  • A man eaten by Bilquis's vagina, made even worse in Dark Horse's adaptation of the novel.
  • Bilquis 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.
  • Wednesday getting half his head blown off. Followed by instant replay!
    • Wednesday's earlier Kavorka Man antics at Christmas with the poor hapless waitress, which Shadow watches with growing discomfort. Two peak points: Shadow likening the waitress to a fawn too young to know that it met an extremely hungry and crafty wolf and if she doesn't run now, she will be ripped apart, and Shadow telling Wednesday she is barely even legal by the looks of her, to which Wednesday glibly answers he was never concerned with legality and though the women he picks generally have fathers and often brothers or even husbands, he will skip town before they find out. Even worse when he reveals that he put two charms on her, one to lure her in and one to make sure she will never love another. And he has done this to many others. Including Shadow's own mother. Which Shadow gets to see in part.
• Signature Scene: An early vignette features a goddess named Bilquis who sleeps with a man, giving him the most amazing sex of his life and then consumes him by absorbing him into her vagina. The author put it in as a kind of content gate, saying if people got past that scene they'd be prepared for the further bizarre events to follow.
• Spiritual Successor: A Played for Drama successor to Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul.
• The Woobie: Poor Shadow doesn't catch a break throughout. When he finally dies by hanging from the World Tree for nine days, just like Odin/Wednesday before him, his last request is to be left alone in The Nothing After Death. Of course, that doesn't last long, since Eostr/Easter brings him back to life for the final battle.

---