American Gods

The climax comes after Wednesday's murder galvanizes the Old Gods to march on the New Gods at Rock City. Shadow, bound by his contract, hangs for nine days on the World Tree in a re-enactment of Odin's mythic ordeal, dies, and travels to the land of the dead, where Anubis judges him. There he learns the truth: Wednesday is his father, and his entire life — his birth, his prison friendship with "Low Key Lyesmith," his wife's death, his recruitment as bodyguard — was engineered as part of a long con. Horus persuades Easter to restore Shadow to life. Shadow then realizes that Mr. World, the New Gods' leader, is Loki, and that Odin and Loki have been running a two-man con together: staging Odin's murder to make the coming battle a massive sacrificial offering that would restore Odin's power, while Loki feeds on the resulting chaos and destruction.

Meanwhile Laura, Shadow's undead wife, makes her own way to Rock City. She kills Mr. Town, who had been carrying a branch cut from the World Tree, and takes the branch herself. Confronting Loki, she drives the branch — which transforms into a spear — into him, mortally wounding him. When Shadow arrives, he finds the wounded Loki and the ghostly remnant of Odin, who confirm the scheme. Shadow then goes to the assembled armies of Old and New Gods and exposes the con: the battle was never necessary, and only Odin and Loki stood to gain from it. He argues that America is fundamentally inhospitable to gods and urges both sides to stand down and return to their countries of origin. The gods disperse peacefully. Loki dies from his wound, and Odin's ghost fades away. Laura, her purpose fulfilled, asks Shadow to take back the magical coin that had reanimated her; he does, and she finally dies for good, at peace.

After recovering with Mr. Nancy, Shadow remembers a dream instruction from Ganesha to "look in the trunk." He returns to Lakeside, the seemingly idyllic town where he had been hiding, and walks onto the thawing lake ice to a sunken car, inside whose trunk he finds the body of a missing local teenager. He falls through the ice and glimpses other cars from previous years on the lake floor, each apparently holding another dead child. Hinzelmann, an elderly local storyteller, rescues him from the icy water — and Shadow discovers that Hinzelmann is himself an old god who has secretly required one child sacrifice each year in exchange for the town's prosperity, choosing victims few would miss. Shadow cannot bring himself to kill his rescuer, but Chad Mulligan, the town's police chief, overhears the confession and shoots Hinzelmann dead. Shadow, using the magic he has learned, erases Chad's memory of the killing to spare him guilt, then leaves Lakeside, understanding its manufactured prosperity will now fade.

In the final scene, Shadow travels to Iceland and meets a more authentic incarnation of Odin, tied to the original Old World belief rather than the corrupted, Americanized Wednesday. Shadow gives him Wednesday's glass eye as a keepsake, and this Odin distinguishes himself from Wednesday's schemes: "He was me, yes. But I am not him." Shadow performs a simple sleight-of-hand coin trick for him, and then, unexpectedly, a genuine piece of magic — conjuring a golden coin from nothing, just as Mad Sweeney once did. He flips it into the air and walks away, left wondering whether it will ever come back down, closing the novel on an open, ambiguous note about Shadow's own nature and future.