American Gods Recap: The Bone Orchard
We begin slightly out of order from the book–but then, the book began slightly out of order.
It’s a pretty neat device: We see the tale told by the keeper of history–Mr. Ibis.
We see the Vikings land in the New World, and they fight to bring Odin’s attention so they can leave. Every time they try to make way into the land, they’re peppered with arrows. However, on wind means they can’t sail.
They preform sacrifices and fight, and eventually they get their wind–and a new god sees a new land.
Shadow Moon and Low Key Lyesmith (get it?) have a bit of patter over prison and the nature of the gallows. Laura–Shadow’s wife–talks to him on the phone about plans for his coming home party, as he’s getting out of prison in five days.
However, we all know this isn’t what’s to happen.
Foreshadowing, anyone?
Shadow has troubled dreams of a frightening, bone-white forest filled with broken skeletons and trees that reach for him, and a bleeding gallows tree at the center.
After he wakes the next day, he’s told he’s being released early because of his wife’s death. She’s died in a car accident.
So much for going home.
When he makes it to the airport, he finds out they won’t accommodate moving his ticket to get him home sooner. Instead, he has to buy a new ticket leaving the next day.
We next see an older man trying to get on last minute for Shadow’s flight–he acts as though he’s got a touch of dementia and evokes sympathy from the gate agent. She loads him in first class. Shadow finds his seat is double booked, and of course he ends up sitting in first class right next to the older gentleman.
Who is obviously a con artist.
The man introduces himself as Mr. Wednesday, and he knows far too much about Shadow.
He tries to offer him a job, but Shadow thinks he has a job waiting for him at home with his friend Robbie.
Shadow takes a nap on the plane, and he dreams of the forest and a buffalo with flaming eyes. ‘Believe’, it tells him.
They make an emergency landing, and he decides to take a car the rest of the way to his wife’s funeral.
Are they going to really go there? Yep, they went there.
We see a timid man meeting an internet date, Bilquis, at a nice restaurant. They go back to her place, and he’s unknowingly entered the temple of a goddess. Bilquis is a Babylonian goddess of love, and she wants to be worshiped. They have sex, and he worships her–this is where we discover her true nature. He lets loose a litany about her as she pulls him entirely inside, literally drawing his entire body inside her like a birth in reverse.
After, her skin seems to shine.
Meanwhile, Shadow stops at The Alligator Bar for food, and guess who’s there? Mr. Wednesday. He lets on that his friend Robbie is also dead, so there’s no job waiting for him.
While they have a drink of mead to seal their new compact, they meet a man who knows Wednesday and claims to be a Leprechaun. He shows Shadow a trick where he pulls gold coins from the air. He says he will teach Shadow the trick if he can beat him in a fight. He seems to also know that Wednesday is more than he seems.
They tear the room apart.
He wakes in the back of a car. Wednesday is driving, and he says Mad Sweeney (the Leprechaun) taught him the trick. He’s got one of the coins in his pocket. They go to Shadow’s wife’s funeral, where Shadow finds out that the car accident Laura (his wife) died in was one of negligence and betrayal–she was giving head to Robbie while he drove, and he crashed the car.
He visits her grave later that night, where his friend’s widow tries to seduce him to get even with her cheating husband. He fends her off and leaves the gold coin on Laura’s grave, where it sinks into the soil.
Here comes this asshole…
As he’s walking down the road in the night, Shadow encounters some strange and flashing piece of tech. It attaches itself to Shadow’s face, and he’s suddenly in the limo of Technical Boy– a flashy and annoying tech kid. He’s vaping (of course he’s vaping) synthetic toad skin, and he keeps blowing the smoke into Shadow’s face. He has faceless goons that slowly render like computerized characters next to Shadow, and Technical Boy threatens him.
He wants to know what Wednesday’s plans are, but of course he’s picked up Shadow too early. Shadow has no idea what he’s gotten into.
He kicks Shadow out of the limo and tells his goons to kill him. They string him up in a tree (reminiscent of the gallows tree in his dream). Just as it looks like he’s going to die, the rope breaks, and the goons are torn apart by a force that Shadow can’t see. It looks a lot like the fighting we saw the Vikings doing in the beginning.
I can’t wait to see where the rest of this goes. Bryan Fuller is doing a good job preserving the look and feel of the book. He uses some of the same techniques he used in Hannibal–rich color, broad and flashy imagery and rich language. The show is beautiful.
JL Jamieson is a strange book nerd who writes technical documents by day, and book news, reviews, and other assorted opinions for you by night. She is working on her own fiction, and spends time making jewelry to sell at local conventions, as well as stalking the social media accounts of all your favorite writers.