Another book I’ve been reading piecemeal, though over longer than this week, is Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens. There’s a spare copy of this in the car for when we get stuck in traffic, for me to read aloud to occupy our minds; it works very well for that, though I’m not so good at reading through snickers. On Wednesday, while waiting for the people who were to help unload the moving truck (they didn’t show), I re-read a bunch of it. To borrow a phrase from Book-a-Minute, “Five billion people almost DIE, and it is FUNNY.”
Good Omens is the story of the Apocalypse. The Antichrist was born eleven years ago; but due to a little mix-up at the hospital, he’s been sent off to a nice English family and been raised completely free of Satanic—or angelic—influences. And there’s this angel and this demon who get along better with each other than their superiors, and this book of really, really accurate (but very muddled in time) prophecies, and the Four Horsepersons, and Dog (Satanical hellhound and cat-worrier), and, well, it’s too hard to describe. Just read it. Really.
Pratchett & Gaiman are very good writers separately, as well. Good Omens might feel a bit more like Pratchett in style (such as the Discworld books), but at that time Gaiman was also writing Sandman, a brilliant comic, so that’s not too suprising.