The STARZ Original Series American Gods will premiere on April 30, approximately a month from now. Premium TV networks can do whatever they want, because the series is obviously based on Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel, which I read over break. To summarize the plot without losing the fun bits: Shadow Moon starts the novel in prison; his wife dies in a car wreck right before he gets out (turns out she was cheating on him with his best friend, who was going to employ him, but died in the same accident); Shadow Moon is reeling until an enigmatic old dude named Mr. Wednesday recruits the reluctant Shadow to be his do-everything henchman; but (SPOILER ALERT) Wednesday turns out to be Odin, who seeks to recruit the neglected Old Gods, drawn from sundry mythological pantheons, to fight a final battle for survival against the uppity New Gods—who are incarnations of contemporary popular obsessions like the media and freeways; naturally, Shadow gets caught in the mix.

At its best, the novel is a singular interpretation of the personalities behind deities (haven’t you ever wondered what would happen if you dropped Anubis into the Midwest?). At its worst, the novel is a repetitive road trip with spurious stakes and unlovable characters. When you think hard about what you’re reading, American Gods devolves into fantasy for fantasy’s sake. Don’t get me wrong, I adore fantasy—I grew up on Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series—it’s just that the things that connected me to Rand al’Thor (that series’ protagonist) are entirely missing from this novel; after all, who wants to root for the henchman? Shadow isn’t even an antihero; his most memorable qualities, Gaiman tells us repeatedly, are his size and his silence. He’s a character built for stoic suffering, and suffer he does—but only so he can serve as a proxy for the reader’s acquisition of information. Rand al’Thor’s setbacks teach him lessons that he internalizes, in the process changing as a character. At the novel’s climax, Shadow pulls off the improbable: he saves the day. But all that’s changed—what empowered him—is what Shadow knows, not who he is. Maybe that’s what Gaiman meant to do by naming his protagonist Shadow: the most corporeal characters in the novel are gods, not people. And I think gods are cool, but I can’t relate. A fantasy novel is supposed to threaten the destruction of the world as we know it, but this one restricts potential damage to the world of the gods, to whom we have access only through the eyes of a man it’s hard to care about.

Another reason why the book felt distant to me: its geography doesn’t align with mine. Neither do fictional universes, but location is central to this book: Gaiman wrote a story that enacts a thought experiment: What if gods moved around in the real world? Gaiman selects the part of the real world in which to anchor the gods consciously and explicitly: American Gods is meant as an ode to Middle America, to the unnoticed places and people that are the corpus of the country. He avoids cosmopolitan ritz (even when Shadow and Wednesday visit Chicago to rob a bank, Gaiman lets us know they ate a $4.99 lunch buffet). Major events occur at (real, named) roadside attractions and natural landmarks, places I’ve never been and to which I will most likely never go. Don’t worry, though, there’s enough violence and sex to ensure that the STARZ series will do just fine.