Spiders!!!

I'm not sure why I didn't catch it for the longest time, but I didn't even realize that I knew the story of Anansi until I started reading. I had completely forgotten about it. I remember watching a crappy animation in grade school in my library class. It was interesting to me how Neil Gaimen could turn that simple little story that felt like a bed time story or something into The Anansi Boys. It made the magical elements make more sense knowing that it was almost a modern mythology type book. I guess something akin to Percy Jackson and the Olympians, only with an African folk tale.
I liked Spider's character and I found it really interesting that he turned out to be Charlie. It was almost like the dark side of him. I can think of so many nerdy references that have a “dark character” like Scott Pilgrim, which is itself a reference to other stories that have one.
I also liked the type of story it was. Of course it was a fantasy and they had the fantasy-like plot points, such as Tiger wanting to seek revenge on Spider for what his father did, but it also had realistic plot points that dealt with fraud in Charilie's business and even murder. It's a nice mesh of the fantasy world and the real world.
Another interesting note is that I'm not very used to all the main characters being black. Not as a prejudice, I'm just not used to the idea of assuming every character introduced in the story is a black person, not a white person. But, I soon got used to it. The Anansi story is an African tale after all, so it's not random or anything.