It took a bit longer than I originally expected, but last night I finally finished reading Anansi Boys and I just have this to say: Neil Gaiman is a master storyteller.
Neil has just weaved a great story from a few seemingly loose strands in American Gods and -I swear- it is a solid web that he traps the reader into. The characters are solid and well developed over time, and by the end of the book they jump right off the page. The situations are very well constructed and some scenes have a frail, dreamlike quality. I can certainly relate to some aspects of the situations that Fat Charlie goes through, most certainly to those bits about parents being involuntarily embarrasing entities. As it is written, the characters’ ultimate destinies are very much like melodies that intertwine gradually and evolve into a great, powerful song. This song flows naturally, armonically, unavoidably. The musical bridges are in their right place, and in retrospect I can see that every note is there for a reason. The end resonates loudly, like a sustained note in a song I that I feel that I’ve heard before. And I probably have: Even now, Neil is one of the few authors that has the strange gift of haunting my sleep with their stories.
Neil: while you’re conceivably baking in the sun and healing from that nasty cold in some heavenly island in the Caribbean after which you shaped St. Andrews, I just have to thank you for taking me wide awake to that mysterious land at the beginning of time that we ordinary humans only visit in our sleep.