So it seems natural enough that Gaiman has returned there with Anansi Boys. But the new book takes a distinctly different tone: Where American Gods was a quirky but weighty road novel, Anansi Boys is a lighter, looser, more playful fable, not quite in, but close to the mode of Gaiman's one-time collaborator Terry Pratchett. Like most of Gaiman's novels, Anansi Boys opens with a patsy, a slightly hapless man with a slightly unhappy life and no idea that there's a larger world outside his own awkward experience. Fat Charlie Nancy isn't fat, but the nickname his eternally embarrassing, larger-than-life estranged father gave him in childhood has stuck with him like a leech. Even when his father suddenly dies in a karaoke bar, Fat Charlie is more humiliated by the circumstances than grief-stricken. He can't bring himself to take seriously the things an old neighbor tells him about his dad's true nature as the former African trickster-god Anansi, or about the revelation that he has a brother who inherited Anansi's semi-divine powers. But on a whim, he takes the neighbor's advice and asks a random arachnid to summon his brother, Spider. Who promptly arrives, bringing along a window into a larger, less predictable, but more rewarding world—and also a huge pile of trouble, of which Spider is the biggest part.
Anansi Boys contains a couple of traditional-style Anansi fables, and the book itself takes a similar ambling but wry, pointed tone; like any good Anansi story, it's about cleverness, appetite, and comeuppance, and it's funny in a smart, inclusive way. And like any good Gaiman book, it's about the places where the normal world and a fantastic one intersect, and all the insightful things they have to say about each other. Initially awkward in prose after a decade of scripting comics, Gaiman has steadily evolved into a comfortable, humorous storyteller whose lively modern fairy tales take protagonists—and readers—on rewarding journeys out of mundanity and into more colorful realities. Anansi Boys just does so with a bigger wink and a bigger grin than most.
