Anansi Boys

Acknowledgments

To begin with, an enormous bunch of flowers to Nalo Hopkinson, who kept a helpful eye on the Caribbean dialogue and not only told me what I needed to fix but suggested ways to fix it; and also to Lenworth Henry, who was there on the day I made it all up, and whose voice I heard in the back of my head when I was writing it (which is why I was delighted to hear that he would be narrating the audio book).

As with my last adult novel, American Gods, I was given two bolt-holes while I was writing this novel. I started writing it in Tori’s spare house in Ireland, and I finished it there as well. She is a most gracious hostess. At one point in the middle, hurricanes permitting, I worked in Jonathan and Jane’s spare house in Florida. It’s a good thing to have friends with more houses than they have bodies, especially if they’re happy to share. Most of the rest of the time I wrote in the local coffee house, and drank cup after cup of terrible tea in a rather pathetic demonstration of hope over experience.

Roger Forsdick and Graeme Baker gave up their time to answer my questions about the police, and fraud, and extradition treaties, while Roger also showed me around the cells, fed me di

Sharon Stiteler kept an eye on the book to make sure the birds passed muster and she answered my birding questions. Pam Noles was the first person to read any of the book, and her responses kept me going. There was a small host of other people who lent me their eyes and minds and opinions, including Olga Nunes, Colin Greenland, Giorgia Grilli, A

Thanks also go to Ellie Wylie; Thea Gilmore; The Ladies of Lakeside; to Miss Holly Gaiman, who turned up to help whenever she decided I needed a sensible daughter around; to the Petes of Hill House, Publishers; to Michael Morrison, Lisa Gallagher, Jack Womack, and Julia Ba

Je

Jon Levin keeps the world of movies ru

I don’t think I could have written Fat Charlie without having had both an excellent but embarrassing father and wonderful but embarrassed children. Hurrah for families.

And a final thank you to something that didn’t exist when I wroteAmerican Gods : to the readers of the journal at www.neilgaiman.com, who were always there whenever I needed to know anything, and who, between them all, as far as I can tell, know everything there is to be known.

Neil Gaiman,

June 2005

E-Book Extra One

Think of this as being one of those odd scenes that normally turn up as extras on DVDs—the scenes that everyone liked, but that made the film work better without them. It’s one of them.

I really enjoyed writing it, and my editor at Headline, the redoubtable Jane Morpeth, was sad when I told her it was going, because she liked it. And for that matter, I liked it too, only it messed up the pacing of the chapter it was in, and once I was prepared to grit my teeth and cut it, everything worked rather better.

I firmly believe that cut scenes are best left cut.

Even so, it had Spider in it, doing what Spider does best. And it had birds in. And in my head, it was the bit of the novel that was almost a Warner Brothers’ cartoon.

So when Jane asked if I would be willing to let it appear—just this once—in the back of the UK edition of Anansi Boys, I found myself, slightly to my surprise, saying yes, and now here it is in the electronic version.

I’ve let it run into an earlier version of the scene that’s still in the novel, at the end of Chapter Eleven. (This scene would have been in Chapter Eleven, split into two or three segments, and occurred between Fat Charlie arriving at the hotel, and the end of the chapter.)

Neil

Spider was imagining himself elsewhere. He was flicking, in his mind, through places he knew, or remembered, or imagined, willing himself there. Nothing happened. He remained precisely where he was, held by the chain of bones in his feathered cell.

He tried doing it the other way, thinking of a person, and trying to make himself be with them. This tended to be a fairly unreliable method of travel for Spider at the best of times: Spider had trouble with other people. He had trouble remembering their faces or their names, or sometimes even that they really existed at all.

He thought about Fat Charlie; he thought of old girlfriends, but they seemed peculiarly unconvincing, reconfiguring in his head into an assembly of breasts and lips and skin and smiles, and they evaporated in his mind; last of all, he thought of Rosie. He thought of her eyes, her warmth, the curve of her nostrils, the smell of her hair.

(And on a cruise ship, dozing by the pool, Rosie shifted uncomfortably.)

Well, thought Spider, if he could not get out one way, he would get out another. There was more than one way to skin a cat, after all1.

He tried changing shape, with no result. He tried shouting. He tried shouting some more.

There was a flapping noise. Two sandhill cranes stood in front of him. They looked at him curiously.

It’s not impossible to be Spider, or something like him. All you need is a complete and utter certainty that everything will work out; a cocky assurance that’s just a hair’s breadth away from psychosis; the conviction that you’re a monstrously clever fellow, and that the universe always looks after its own.

“You know,” said Spider to the birds, “I don’t want to cause a problem but these chains are a bit loose. One solid tug and I could fall down.”

The birds might have looked concerned. Spider couldn’t be sure. It’s hard to tell with birds.

“It’s a shocking job,” said Spider. “Whoever made these chains should be properly ashamed of themselves. Frankly, I could get out of them in a couple of minutes, and think of the trouble you’d all be with herself if I simply fell out of them and wandered off. Quite appalling workmanship.”

The cranes looked at each other. One of them strutted back towards the wall. Spider watched it—a jog to the left, then it reached out its beak to the wall, and it touched a feather there, a feather paler than the others. And then it was gone.

“You know,” said Spider to the remaining crane. “Let’s just pretend I didn’t say anything. I’d hate to put you all to any bother.”

A fluttering, and now the space was filled with huge crows who landed on the bone chains, then strutted about like builders examining the work of quite a different firm of builders, one that had left town with the work left incomplete. They cawed and tokked in what Spider was certain was the corvine equivalent of “So what sort of cowboy put this together than?”