Suvudu Universe

If you’ve ever driven down the country roads of Georgia, Tennessee, or Kentucky, you’ve probably seen the signs written in thick, white, capital letters across the roofs of barns, sheds, even birdhouses: SEE ROCK CITY. It’s a tourist attraction — maybe more accurately a tourist trap — just south of Chattanooga at the top of Lookout Mountain. An ordinary enough place. Unless Neil Gaiman is your guide.

There are two types of attractions at Rock City: the natural and the man-made. The natural attractions include rock trails, which wind through bizarre rock formations, the Fat Man’s Squeeze, which is a thin crevice in a giant stone, and Thousand-Ton Balanced Rock, which is exactly what the name implies. Since the 1830s, the place has been described as “a citadel of rocks,” where the boulders are arranged in a way “as to afford streets and lanes.” Hence the name Rock City.

The man-made attractions are a little less impressive. The Rainbow Room is a walled section of the path where the windows are covered in colored plastic film. The quarter-a-throw binoculars claim that a visitor can see seven states on a clear day, but that claim is in dispute. And Neil Gaiman calls the descent into an underground cavern lined with dioramas of nursery-rhymes and fairy-tales “a drop into some strange hell.”

But all of that merely scratches the surface of what there really is to see at Rock City, as long as you let Gaiman guide you there through his novel American Gods. Shadow, the novel’s hero, arrives at Lookout Mountain hoping to stop a battle of the gods. But he finds the place empty, abandoned, deserted.

“No. Not deserted. Not exactly. This was Rock City. It had been a place of awe and worship for thousands of years; today the millions of tourists who walked through the gardens and swung their way across the Swing-A-Long bridge had the same effect as water turning a million prayer wheels. Reality was thin here.”

With that understanding, Shadow finds the battlefield where the gods are arrayed, the old gods against the new. There are ifrits and piskies, giants and dwarfs, “gods with skins the brown of old mushrooms, the pink of chicken flesh, the yellow of autumn leaves.” There are railroad gods, “great gray gods of the airplanes,” and car gods. The old gods are fighting against the gods that have already replaced them. The new gods are fighting, but at the same time are afraid of being replaced themselves by even newer gods.

And it may be too late for Shadow to stop the carnage. He quickly sees that there is “already blood on the rocks.”

So if you’re in the neighborhood, do as the signs say. See Rock City. See the Fat Man’s Squeeze, the Thousand-Ton Balancing Rock, the “citadel of rocks.” See the Rainbow Room, the “Seven States,” the dioramas. Just remember that there might be more going on that you don’t see. At least, not unless you realize that reality, as the story goes, is thin here.