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[Applause] [Music] so Neil how are you I'm okay I'm not great I mean I'm you know I I because my
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wife is a genius and because our luck happened to be good and because she simply happened to be finishing a 14
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month tour in New Zealand I was waiting for her in Melbourne Australia and we were meant to be going on a we were
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meant to be going on a hang on we were meant to be going on a holiday together and to celebrate the end of her tour and
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of course that didn't that that was obviously not going to happen and then I got a call from her saying New Zealand is gonna go into lockdown or at least
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people coming in and gonna go into enforced quarantine I think if you don't get over here immediately you are not
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going you and - are not gonna see me for two weeks or three weeks either I'll be stuck in New Zealand or you're gonna be stuck in Melbourne or I'll be you know in quarantine in Melbourne this is not
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going to work so we better get together and very lucky and very lucky so lucky and we came out here Amanda cancelled her gig over the
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incredible protests of the organisers were very grumpy about it the promoters but the church the venue that it was in were really sweet about it and they
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we did this sort of Amanda sort of strange webcast thing and she asked me if I'd like to do something so I read The Masque of the Red Death from the pool Wow at the vicar's West which I
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love and and then read Goodnight Moon at the end of it and then all of a sudden we were on this sort of strange enforced kind of holiday and at the point where
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it became very obvious that we were about to go into lockdown but before it had been announced we rented a place to
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stay and we were very lucky very fortunate we found a beautiful place it has an avocado tree in the garden that we climb and pick avocados from it has
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food joah trees which is a fruit that I was unfamiliar with but which tastes faintly perfumey and they're slightly gritty and but a kind of wonderful anyway there's
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books and it has books and I'm loving the book selection which I think goes back to seems to date back to the 1920s and it has an a piano which makes Amanda
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happy oh wow I get books she has a piano and it has an oval billiards table thing giant oval snooker table and we have not
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yet tried actually playing with the giant oval snooker table but one day perhaps we were you know if it wasn't at the fact that it's three adults and a four year old it would probably be
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wonderful except that there is a four year old he is a delight he is a joy he does not come with an off switch right we've now created school for him so in
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the morning he goes down to the billiard room and in a corner of the billiard room he goes to school good for you well we we are here we are gathered here to talk about this beautiful book which
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I know you've seen I I've got this is my only copy of it I love by the way for I hope readers will be pleasantly titillated by the dust jacket which has
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footnotes on it I think that's a first in the history of publisher I I just love the idea of annotating the cover and it was the it's the only it's
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the only time I think I've ever come up with an idea like that where when the editor said to me what kind of thing do you want on the cover I think could we just couldn't we just annotate it well
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and you follow through with one of the world's first annotated introductions absolutely so if you don't like footnotes I I've occasionally had there
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was a review that I forgotten where it appeared of one of my previous books in which the reviewer said that they loved the book but they were very disturbed by the clouds of footnotes surrounding the
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text and of course I had wanted to say to them do you not see the part where it says annotated on the cover but so here we're certainly giving fair warning to
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the readers what to anticipate so it was a joy for me to work on this is one of my favorite books of all time and for you it was kind of the it was a blast from the past to some extent I guess
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this book you wrote this book in 2000 I started it properly I guess in 1998 end of 1990 started it in 1998 wrote some of
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it in 99 and then 2000 was the big writing you know the year that it basically got written so for that you would only written one book that started
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as a novel Stardust Neverwhere had not started as a novel and yet this is very different from Stardust why did you write this why I mean what
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motivated you to write this particular story this format I had a book that I was contracted to write called time in the smoke which I had plotted
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and which maybe one day I will still write or maybe I will fold into the never way universe but it was a book
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about London and time and I'd written Stardust I just come out in paperback Neverwhere
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came out as a hardback in paperback and I thought you know if I do one more book set in England or London I will be
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perceived by Barnes and Nobles computer system as that guy who writes the semi fantastic books about London I thought I don't think I can write time in the
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smoke right now I think that's the wrong book to do and in August of 92 I had moved to America moved to Wisconsin and
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it had been a very strange experience for me because the I was familiar with
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big city America I was not familiar with small-town America and it was odd and it was weird and I kept pointing to things and going is that weird to you and they
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go no no no this is just the way we always do things all of America it's not strange to anybody right there was there was a definite sort of points where I kept going this is really weird and
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whether it was people driving cars out on the ice I'm waiting for the ice to melt and for the car to fall in every year or whether it was you know places attractions like the house on the rock
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there were these things where I was like I think that stuff is weird and I think oh Claire understand it I think I want to tell people and so for me American guns really having lived in
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America by that point for about six years was my attempt at trying to understand America trying to get a little bit under the skin of America
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trying to actually going I don't understand it I know that I don't understand it let me go and have fun and was slightly guided by a folklorist I whose books I
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had picked up and read called richard dawson and I just loved these richard dawson folklore books I haven't even I think I probably read three before I realized it was the same
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person you know it's that thing where you you suddenly noticed that actually you're really enjoying these books by this person but you were just picking them up because they were books about
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local folklore and the and that was just one quote a richard dawson quote that stuck with me about the idea that the
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gods had been left behind on the other other heading across the ocean to a memory okay and i thought i think that
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that is a thing and then summer of 98 I think I was in Reykjavik and I was
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incredibly jet-lagged incredibly sleepy it was July the fourth which seemed very appropriate and I
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wandered into this tourist office and saw a tabletop diorama of the voyages of the noble Viking who
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had made it all the way to Vinland to Newfoundland and back and I looked at this and I just thought I wonder if the Vikings left their gods there when they
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went and suddenly I had a book everything it was like all of it was like having a giant mathematical problem
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that I've been working on for years and this tiny little thing became the the key to solving the maths problem and a
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couple of days later in Bergen in Norway I wrote an email to my editor and to my
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agent saying this is the book there's a book that all right and the working title is American Gods and I really did think of it as a working title I didn't
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think of it as the title but you know by the time I got home I had a mock-up of the kaabah is the cover of your book you
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know was the original cover and is the cover of your annotated book yes for me and it said American Gods and big letters and it had that highway a with the lightning strike and it said Neil Gaiman at the bottom and it looked like
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the cover of a book you said I guess I'd better write it and I also didn't worry anymore about changing the title there was like oh okay it's obviously called American Gods and
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it's a quite I'm fascinated by process because mine is completely different I don't announce the publishers anymore what I'm writing I asked them humbly if
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I can please write something and I in this book in this annotated edition one of the things I tried to do was to lay for readers in great detail the process
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in the sense that the notes and appendices of the book reproduce some of your notes some of your drafts the footnotes compare various editions and
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drafts and so on and I love doing that because I love looking at text but the point of it from my point of view is to help readers understand your approach to
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the craft and and how you created this book yeah um so I mean you're you're an outliner is that a fair thing to say as opposed to a panther you just sort of
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lets the story flow out do it um well you read you would read the outlines yes because you read them and I'm much more of a sort of outline as far as I know
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and then keep writing I mean I'm somebody who tends I think in American goods I probably did it about three or four times to stop and take
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track of where we are and list all the things that needed to happen based on that so it's a I think an outliner is
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somebody who and I can do it it's just no fun for me who does all the work in the outline stage which is great except for me it's
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it's no fun I don't get to surprise myself I was gonna ask about that I was going to say you know it's clear to me that there must have been surprises along the way here and do you want to
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talk about any particular ones or I think there were definitely ones where
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um I used the fact that I was creating these short stories that we're also going to be part of the plot as a way of
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getting myself out of trouble because they meant that if I got stuck I always had a short story that I could be working on so I'd go okay i i've got
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shadow o to cairo in in southern no i'm not quite sure where he's going next to what's gonna happen to him he's these Mets and Egyptian gods but I'll leave
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him here for a couple of weeks and I'll go and write a story about for a fourteen thousand year old coming to America from Siberia I'll write that one
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so those are your little holidays were you sort of while you're doing that somewhere the back of your brain it's figuring out what share does gonna do next exactly be what Stephen King calls the
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boys in the back room or the boys in the basement and they're they're doing all the heavy lifting and I get to go and write something else anyone else Oh Lee
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Child has pointed out that Jack Reacher drinks coffee a lot during his books he says every time there's a coffee break you know it's me going to make some coffee to figure out what's happening next so
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okay so the stories are your coffee breaks the stories on my coffee breaks all the stories are my I have no idea what happens now and I need to figure it
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out and it was what I loved about the book was there was a kind of inexorability to what happened but you know some things that
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surprised the readers surprised me i readers go we expected a big war at the end and i'm like i expected a big war at the end I did not expect the thing that
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happened which was you know shadow basically ending the war by announcing the explaining it big but one of the things that became more and more
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interesting to me as I was writing the book was the nature of a two-man con you know there are there are themes that run all the way through American guards and
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one of them is the big store confidence tricks it's the classic American the idea of you know what is a two-man con how does
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it work we and we explain it rarely earlier and we explain the concept of you know the fiddle game we explain the bishop dodge we explain how a two-man
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con works this book is in large part I think reflects your fascination with magic coin magic in particular and and
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the con game which is sort of an intertwined our friend Jamy Ian Swiss I know was a consultant on the book and I'm a very poor amateur magician myself
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so I love that aspects and was able to pick out a wool of course this came from Bobo's book of course and so on so um that that leads me to a question that I've had about your writing in general
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this book in particular Sandman was very much the same and that is about the research it's clear to me as the guy who ends up sort of checking out looking of
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every little historical fact every of trivia every detail that you've worked in these books that you have done enormous amounts of research where does
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that come in the process do you do the research you just sort of store things up and say maybe I'll use that someday or do you stop and then go look for something and for example I mean as
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they're traveling around America you have bits of local history that are essentially a hundred percent accurate and fact they have nothing to do with
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the plot they're just they're just candies in the fruitcake they're they're their pennies in the plum pudding or whatever the analogy is but so how do they get there and how do you work with
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that um all sorts of ways you know it's like some of the research I didn't do a
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lot of research on the gods didn't do a lot of research on the gods because when I started writing this book I was almost 40 and I'd spent the previous 30 years
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35 years whatever reading stuff about the gods reading every mythology I could find reading that stuff so that was they're the only gods that I really wound up doing whatever research I could
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on which at the time was frustrating now it might be frustrating in a different direction with the Slavic gods yes and
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the Slavic gods I remember buying a book like an encyclopedia of gods and buying it primarily for the Slavic gods because
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I noticed it had them in there and I and I read all the entries and they were fabulous and that's where I got I learned about Anna bog and Bella bug I
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learned about the Zarya I I learned about Perrin the sort of the Slovak Thor equivalent and [Music] then I went to the back of the book
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where it had the bibliographies for every every every mythology and it had nothing for the Slavic gods it was like
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great I don't I this was pre-internet and it was really hard to find stuff so I found what I could
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I made up a lot and now that you understand that what you've written has become part of the mythology hey I love that did what was that like for you
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going out and trying to research yeah it was like wait a minute two of the zoria seemed to be real but this third one there is nothing about it and then I would find web pages that would regurgitate what you had written
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about it as as fact which of course it was but you know but it is that weird thing where I you know I for a while there was a very short while in early
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Wikipedia days where I tried to keep Wikipedia on track um and that lasted
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until the publication in 2004 of some mythology book which included zoria polemic maya in it which they'd obviously got from American Gods but as
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far as Wikipedia was concerned the published source with zoria polomoche layer now validated her and I'm like she's called sorry Apollo much now because I went on to become P you serve
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forum in forum and said what would what would what would sister midnight be all is set we have the dawn and we had the dawn stone we had the evening star what would the midnight
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zoria be and they were like ah sorry up Ilana thank you so that was how she got named yes well that no of course the the mythology parts of the book were
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challenging research because there's so many different stories but having said that that wasn't you know I there wasn't a lot of making stuff up with the gods I
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had a lot of that stuff in there I had the north stuff I had right out of it and I was fortunate to have a really good text on Norse mythology that came out just a couple years ago by this Neil
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Gaiman fella so I remember him I hear I hear it's readable the and I did you know one thing that I did that I was really
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pleased now that I did was back when um American Gods was coming out and I was just having to write people would say you know can you write something for the
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Barnes & Noble web page can you write something for the board his book web page he writes something for Powell's web page whatever for one of those I did
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a bibliography of American guards so having that now to go back and look at I can go okay well these were my yes he's like maybe it's reproduced in the book
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by the way I I added on to it the books that I used in addition to the books that you used so people can see what books you used it's reproduced we are little stars five books that we did
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yours there was something that would feel bad that I I left them behind what about the American side I mean what about the a lot of that stuff was buying
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American books and and getting very very into American history wherever I was traveling I would get in the car and drive I would do these
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amazing road trips which for me were like the ultimate adventure I would just you know I I had friends particularly
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Tori Amos and when Tori wound up needing her house because she got pregnant [Music] Jonathan Ross in Florida would give me houses they did not live in to go in and
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just right but the journey to those houses was the was the huge adventure tip for me I would do these enormous drives around and back and say oh that's
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a cool place yeah absolutely I don't know I deserve a park in Florida Whitney Watchi I'd see the signs that I've read the books Rock City where our
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Ragnarok takes place yes um I had genuinely not heard of but one of my rules doing my first big drive and I tried to keep it up forever after was no
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freeway driving except at night I'll Drive freeways at night because you have no view driving at night wherever you are right the rest of the time I would just drive on freeways I'd drive
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on back roads drive on old county roads just I figure okay it's gonna whack a day or so onto my travel but the the point is the journey not be how quickly
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I can get there and I just remember you know somewhere entering Tennessee I think on a back road just seeing a sign saying you know see Rock City the
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world's Marvel in the way the world's wonder that painted on the top of an old barn and I assumed this must be very close by and decided to go and find Rock
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City it is a different America I when I was when I was very young we took a trip on route 66 across country from Chicago all the way to California you know strange
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things signs saying the world's largest ball of string is here and you know then in California we have the wonderfulness of in Northern California we have the
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world's artichokes the artichoke center of the world and the artichoke capital of the world they're both about they're about 10 miles apart arguing about it for generations I think that's so
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beautiful I loved you know trying to investigate where the exact center of America was was something that I
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delighted him I you know doing the research that was one of those places where I bought all the books and went into the is deep into the proto internet
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that we had in 1998 ish as I could learned the history of how they worked out the exact center of America and the fact that the exact center of America
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actually when they did this thing which they did by making out of cardboard back then finding the place where it balanced
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sounds like a high school science fair project absolutely was and it turned out to be on Johnny Gribbs hog farm and they decided the exact center of America couldn't be Johnny Gribbs hog farm so
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they found the nearest sort of open space they could put a little Park on and they put a tiny motel in a tiny chapel there and that is the exact center of America except it isn't
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that's the American lost spirit you know exactly so turning to the sort of the serious theme of the book I I did some recent research just a look and you know
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we're in a state of affairs according to polls the number of Americans who identify the as Christian is declined by 12 percentage points over the last decade
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those who identify themselves as atheistic agnostic or nothing in particular is up almost 10 points from 2009 to 26 percent are the gods in
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trouble I mean is this is this a new age obviously the pandemic is keeping people from going to worship in places of worship but are the gods really about to
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get wiped out oh I think that the I think that the only thing that you can be sure of with God's and relations is that there is always flux there is
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always change and religions and gods die eventually when nobody believes in them and nobody worships them but it's
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amazing how sticky some of them are I think we're in a period we're definitely in a period of change the the old gods
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versus new gods if it's a battle for people's attention if it's a battle for time and headspace which is the way that
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I always saw it then the new gods over the last 20 years have made enormous inroads you know they'd be the technical
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boy that I wrote about was very much the technical boy of 1999 he was a overweight kid who really was thrilled
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to figured out how to get a pizza without having to talk to a human being the idea that it was just be delivered dude with the room over the garage in
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his parents house that he lived in and he wouldn't have to talk to anybody that was the technical boy of them the technical boy of now you know is is and
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is a billionaire the technical boy of now is smooth and sharp and turns up at TED conferences except of course in
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these days of coronaviruses there may never be another TED conference I'll be like this very very probably or something like this
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I'm really interested to see what this does to people how they you know it may have done something very bad it may have
00:33:23
done something very good I'm spending I have never spent six weeks in the company of my wife and that's our and
00:33:39
nobody nothing else you know we're just here with our friends Anthea and there is no going off and hanging with other people there's no one going off to the office there's no worry about just we're
00:33:53
just here to actually talk and play and interact and ash is frustrated because he doesn't get other kids and he's elated because he gets um you know his
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mum gives him you know this morning she was recording a song and ash decided he wanted to play cymbals and you know her
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four-year-old playing cymbals right and there's a lovely there's a lovely book that I've been enjoying called a song for a new day by Sarah Pinsker that's nominated for the Hugo
00:34:36
she clearly didn't know that this was gonna happen but it anticipates the time not very far in the future when the combination of terrorism and pandemics has caused the government to enact anti
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congregation was nobody can be in large gatherings and all that and the book is very much about the need for some community and yes Holograms have
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provided concert zoom has provided opportunities etc but it's not quite safe none of it thing I'm the thing of mind
00:35:13
that is most interesting for me right now and I sort of I wonder if this is gonna happen why is the ocean at the end of the lane my novel was turned into a
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play by the National Theatre in the UK and it was an enormous hit at the National and they're taking it to the West End and it was meant to be opening at the end of October and I'm wondering
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if that will ever happen I'm wondering if the theaters will ever open again and there are so many things that in ordered so many artistic things particularly that in order to make them
00:35:56
happen you need to get a lot of people together in the same place yes to make good television absolutely although I understand already people are figuring
00:36:07
out technologies where actors can appear in the same scene they can see each other they perform together remotely so they'll be they'll be pivots there'll be massive changes but we're not we're not
00:36:22
down we're we're as the Queen said very long we meet again yes we will it's been a very long time since I read a an Isaac
00:36:36
Asimov book called The Naked Sun yes well I mean I and when I say a long time I think I was eight when I read it you thought it was gonna be a little bit
00:36:50
risky maybe noise lambent would appear in it again you know and so on this is why by the way this is why I joined the science fiction book club because you may recall they they had an ad on the back of
00:37:02
galaxy magazine that showed noise lambent the heroine of the end of eternity lying on a couch sort of diaphanous League ound and all that so a book called the naked Sun really
00:37:14
promised big stuff you know it was if this was an English edition though and it was an English edition in the 1960s during that period of time where
00:37:28
publishers were saving enormous amounts of money in the UK by having very photographic covers and Asimov who then got some fantastic covers from Chris
00:37:40
Foss in the early 70s and glorious as more covers but during the 60s most of his
00:37:51
covers were photographs so the naked Sun it was a look like a photograph of a city and there was despite the title you knew there was gonna be nothing
00:38:05
titillating of any kind inside aged 8-12 this was what was a suppose first of all was as Amol who never could write women but no you're right I never thought about that book a very prescient book
00:38:19
about people living in isolation remotely and of course it's a murder mystery how does this murder get committed when people don't actually go see each other so and that you know it's
00:38:33
a book that I was definitely thinking it will be interesting to go back to the dawn and because I can see a well-known which things happen remotely and I think
00:38:48
it also will be if it happens like that it will be tragic well so this is a good segue to now that you have all this time on your hand what are you working on
00:39:00
are you working on something like is this creative time or you know the the tragedy and Amanda and I came to this house and when this is great we have a
00:39:13
friend who's an assistant who's a nanny we have lots of stuff that we want to do and look at this we are gonna get so
00:39:25
much done right and then we started finding that we're actually like paddling dog paddling in place
00:39:39
desperately just to keep our heads above water in the waking up every day and the email mountain that would have arrived and I'm I have had to go okay I need to forgive
00:39:52
myself for missing emails they are just I'm going to miss them it's going to happen I'm the flood of requests from people all of whom think they're the only
00:40:06
person in the world who's gone I know what group X is suffering because of covered I will go to Neil Gaiman and ask him if he can do something that's only 15
00:40:18
minutes out of his day right cheer up group X raise money for group Y or do how does my friend my writer friend Hank Phillippi Ryan said who knew
00:40:29
there was so much laundry and there is there's laundry there's cooking there's there's I cannot look at the day any more and go you know I need that extra
00:40:44
45 minutes just to get this thing done but that's fine I will call in some food I'll get some food delivered or whatever now anything food wise you know with
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planning out days ahead so that we've got ingredients so that we and Plus even if we've got a nanny she she's on you know if she does ten till for
00:41:14
every day a man I will take over you know and then one of us is there are rotors in this house less it's all who's doing the cleaning rotor who's cooking who's had another toilet paper shortage
00:41:28
used in New Zealand as well I think there were for a little while but that seems to have sorted itself out the food shortages seem to have sorted themselves
00:41:43
out here the biggest but but having said that going to the supermarket is still something that is gonna take up many many hours of your day and if you're gonna go you're probably gonna get up at
00:41:56
5:30 to be in line at the supermarket when it's gonna open but and the line will already have been long and as you go in so - you know they're gonna let
00:42:08
you in one at a time and it's well alright so you're so you're on holiday right now but in writing I you know some writing is happening but for every bit
00:42:22
of writing that happens it's being clawed out of the day it's not easy I'm finishing an introduction tomorrow I
00:42:33
will wrap it up and send it to George RR Martin's ID to a george RR martin work and part of the fun of that has actually been doing this mammoth reread and
00:42:47
george has been getting more and more anxious about me being late with it and I'm like yeah George it's you George come on I'm not allowed to say that but
00:42:58
I am allowed to say you have been saying no I'm just enjoying rereading it so much and you can't rush it well so are we ever gonna see any more of shadow you think or other folks from the book I
00:43:11
think so well there's a dumb to shadow stories so right are those new shadow stories imply and then there is meant to be American
00:43:22
Gods too once he get when shadow gets back to the US and I have but there's a bunch of stuff I know about American Gods - all right well so the food will
00:43:37
end up being a box set so one day but I think there's also me right now wanting to see how America shakes down yes I I
00:43:51
want to see what what it becomes well let me talk for a second the book so that this is a little bit of a marketing thing the the process was really
00:44:07
interesting first of all I have the number of times publicly thank you and your staff for giving me access to all the things that you did the people at HarperCollins Jennifer Grell was just
00:44:20
wonderful it was kind of an interesting experience for both of us Jennifer and myself so going through the process of this book they started out saying we don't want any pictures and I said okay and then I
00:44:35
said well maybe I'll just send you some anyway and she said fine and so then it was like 30 or 40 and then she said more than more okay fine so we have almost a
00:44:47
hundred illustrations here and then I don't know if you know that this we went through this whole process where she sent out the galleys and the first 32 pages were gorgeous color just beautiful
00:45:01
and the rest of the book was black and white in the galleys and I said oh it's you know that's nice I look forward to seeing the rest of the colored pages she said well they weren't going to be any that's it and I said really you know we
00:45:15
have all these beautiful pictures and all that and ultimately they relented they said fine we'll go will delay the book we'll make it all in color and as you know because you've seen it it's
00:45:27
just gorgeous it is the Mike didn't I didn't know that little story I'm glad that you pushed because the book itself is a thing of incredible beauty and it by the way
00:45:39
and I'd wanted it to happen since my then wife Mary read the original manuscript and I said what do you think and she said are there footnotes and I
00:45:53
did no and she said well I wish there were footnotes because I don't know who these people are now there are a few footnotes there's probably close to a thousand notes the the design of the
00:46:06
book fortuitously so jennifer and i talked a little bit but what i what it was gonna look like and she found a designer for the book his sister actually did my annotated dracula for
00:46:20
which you will be introduction and gave him the book and said make it look like this that that's another gorgeous gorgeous book and so you know real credit to HarperCollins we immoral
00:46:32
people for making this a truly beautiful book I had nothing to do with it it's just gorgeous and I love to look through it and see all the beautiful Collins in the borders so let me ask you a question
00:46:45
iswhat was the most as the researcher as the person who had this novel had you know two different texts of the novel
00:46:58
plus with an ad and plus access to all of the notes and all of the early drafts everything like that what was the most interesting thing that you found on the
00:47:11
way what was your favorite discovery the serial killer family from Kansas yes I known something about them and by the
00:47:23
way there's actually a graphic novel about them but I hadn't done the depth of research that I ended up doing for the footnote here yes that was one of my favorites up but of course and this is a
00:47:36
perfect segue to talk about the nameless God and how much research time I wasted that is wasted well nothing's wasted
00:47:47
it's all a learning experience so I know that the readers are desperate to find out in this video who the nameless goddess and I have always promised you know the funny thing
00:48:02
is on things like this when I was doing Sandman and people would say to me so who is the missing member of the endless I would say how its destruction because
00:48:19
it was 1990 1991 there were there was no internet if I told somebody they do that's interesting and that was cool by the time that American Gods roll
00:48:35
around I was like oh should I tell people should I tell people how does that work and but I thought I probably will and then somebody wrote to my web page and just said please don't and I went oh
00:48:49
okay well they'll find out in the next American Novel gods novel when I was just going to say that they'll find out for sure probably God's to definitely
00:49:01
find out in American Gods to who the name was good was so that'll be there for them and since then I've actually kind of enjoyed not telling people I've
00:49:12
seen you know hundreds upon hundreds of guesses and suppositions and which have not always been wrong I've seen certainly seeing some accurate guesses
00:49:26
in one direction and some accurate guesses in another direction so well my carefully researched notes on the subject are absolutely inconclusive so
00:49:37
excellent which is the way some things should be I suppose I think you meant to leave things inconclusive and I love that you you you discovered the bloody benders and
00:49:49
I love that you know I remember just the sheer joy of being able to take the driving the characters to Kansas past
00:50:12
the place where the Bender's had been and going you know the way the Bender's did their serial killing of travelers was the room was divided with a sheet
00:50:25
and they had on the other side of the sheet was darkness and one side of the sheet was well lit with an oil lamp and the bender would just stand behind the
00:50:38
sheet with a hammer a hammer yes that's the key parts mash in the head with a hammer and I thought channa Bob would love that he was like them people and also of
00:50:52
course one of the themes that runs all the way through American Gods is the idea of human sacrifice is the idea that
00:51:04
for all of these old gods well for pretty much all of them the thing that you know they used to have that was so fantastic and so important to them was human
00:51:15
sacrifice and that is gone of course in American Gods too I think I would start looking at ways that people have been sacrificed
00:51:31
recently and what that would mean but that would be a whole other story all right well this has been on so it's still Easter's day here in
00:51:43
Los Angeles so a very fitting day to had this conversation she would approve she and it's been a pleasure to catch up and to talk about this book I think it comes
00:51:57
out on the 14th in the United States I'm not sure when it comes out other places of the 14th that is to say April 14 and assuming that things stay on track it
00:52:08
will be in bookstores everywhere and I own that as real everywhere as well I mean it's you know that with luck you will be able to either go to your book stuff bookshop so book store or you will
00:52:23
be able to get them to send you a coffee exactly exactly well my best to Amanda and - and stay well stay safe we will
00:52:35
say we will meet again it's so lovely seeing you and I hope that next time in [Music]
00:52:50
you
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