Title Good Omens Series --- Author Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett Cover Art --- Publisher HarperCollins - 2006 First Printing 1990 Category Humour Warnings None Main Characters Aziraphale, Crowley, Adam Young, Anathema Device, Newt Pulsifer, Shadwell, Madame Tracy, DEATH, War, Famine, Pollution Main Elements Angels, demons

According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner.

So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon—both of whom have lived amongst Earth's mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle—are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture.

And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist . . .

I'll be upfront and say that humour books are hit or miss with me, and that I'm not a fan of Monty Python. Sure there are some jokes that get a chuckle from me, but British humour doesn't always work with me. And I don't live in, nor even visited England, so some of the things that are probably incredibly funny to people in the know were completely missed by me (even with the help of useful footnotes). This is not a fault of the book, that's just the nature of this type of thing. I'm sure if someone wrote the equivalent to take place where I live I'd find it a lot funnier since it's more personal.

That said, it didn't mean I didn't get any of the jokes, there were definite chuckles and a few outright laughs. It was also a bit thought provoking. Take Crowley and Aziraphale, a demon and an angel who have been living amongst humans for millenia. Along the way they kind of started to like living among us and now that the end of the world is approaching they have to give up their Bentley's and book stores and go back to living in Heaven and Hell which are, frankly, kind of boring compared to the human world. So they decide that they will work together to avert the apocalypse. Only problem is, the antichrist has been misplaced. Which is maybe it a good thing, since he got to grow up human without anyone trying to influence him. On the bad side, well, he grew up human and we're imperfect at best. Given the choice of keeping the world the way it is and wiping it out to remake it better, what would you do? Oh, and you're only 11 years old by the way, where the thought of repopulating America with cowboys and indians, and the seas with pirates, is an awesome idea.

Toss in a random mix of crazy characters (a fortune teller, a couple witch hunters, and of course the prophecies of Agnes Nutter). We also meet DEATH, his all-caps speech is pure Pratchett, but then Death would be the same whether he's here or in Discworld, although Gaiman is also famous for his own death creation (I swear one day I'll get around to his Sandman graphic novels, but they are always out when I go to the library!). I felt they did an excellent job anthropomorphising the Riders, even switching out Pestilence (he retired after pennecillin was invented) with Pollution (which has certainly become a bigger issue, and ironically, human driven).

For what it's worth, I almost enjoyed the bonus bits at the end of my book, where Terry spoke about Neil and Neil spoke about Terry. Made me appreciate more how this book was written and how technology has moved along, they found it faster to mail their drafts back and forth than they did using the dial-up modem they had! Wonder how the apocaplypse would have envisioned in the book had it been written now? Imagine how if Crowley had fun disrupting the phone service during lunch on a work day what mischief he could get up to on the Internet?

And what does it mean when the very day after you finish reading the book and you head out to work and you pass a black Bentley parked on the side of the road, in a city where Bentleys are far and few between? Well, I'm writing this on the Sunday after so I guess we'll be ok.