For book muses, what is your muse’s favorite scene? Why? Can you provide a short excerpt?
It Came from the Dead Meme Pile || ??
So the book is a lot different from the show, and currently my copy of the book is in storage, but here goes:
On 23 December {funny because my hc is that Sweeney's bday is 21 December aka Midwinter, Yule, the Winter Solstice which in Wiccan belief is the rebirth of the sun}, Mr Jacquel and Mr Ibis receive a call from the police and send Shadow to go get the body, discreetly. Shadow drives the hearse, thinking about how hearses are no longer driven in town now that Americans want to pretend that death does not happen. Shadow pulls up behind the cars and sees Mad Sweeney's frozen body next to a dumpster, with a bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey still in his lap. A police officer, registering Sweeney as a John Doe, writes out the instructions for an autopsy for Shadow to take back to Jacquel and Shadow loads Sweeney's body into the hearse. As he drives back to the funeral home, Sweeney reanimates his body long enough to ask Shadow to give him a proper wake, as it was Shadow's theft that caused his death in the first place.
On one hand, this part of the story illustrates that Americans still want to believe something about death, as shown by Ibis and Jacquel {Horus and Anubis} having a continued presence here, but that there is a taboo on speaking aloud about it. This is part of the reason Jacquel and Ibis's powers are waning, as they need people to accept death and the underworld in order to survive.
Sweeney manages to drink himself to death in a thoughtless suicide, leaving his body to freeze in the cold, after begging Shadow for money to buy the booze. Neil Gaiman later hints that Sweeney would have simply been resurrected from this experience if enough people believed in him, but belief in leprechauns was so faint that he remained dead.
There's a bit more to it. During the wake, he revives while Mr Jacquel tells stories of his origin, and of Bessie McGowan, how he came to America, and the power of those whispers allows Sweeny to attend his one party, and make nasty little asides and quips about the old stories. He manages to try to teach Shadow the Coin Trick one more time, and honestly I think he deserved better.
In that way, I think I like the reimagining of the show, in which Sweeney gets an opportunity to come to terms with his fate, to be given agency over himself, to go out on a powerful note rather than being a footnote for Shadow's story.
But then again, I have a lot of issues with Shadow, so it could just be me.
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