This morning, I finally closed my battered paperback copy of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens. It's rather sad to finish a reread. You open it up, knowing you're going to enjoy it, and loving the fresh start...and then it's all over again. And yes, you can read it again, but you don't do that immediately. In my case, I know I have a TBR pile of review copies. I really do most of my rereads at night, in bed, because I won't sleep if I don't know what's coming next.
I have one of the early copies of Good Omens that doesn't have the extra bits with the authors talking about each other and how they started it and sent each other floppy disks and yelled excitedly over the phone. Some of it is in the Terry Pratchett collection A Slip Of The Keyboard anyway, but my e-copy of GO has the lot. It's kind of sad to think that when they finally did dramatise it, they did a radio play, which is unlikely to turn up here, instead of a film or even one of those telemovies that are based on the Discworld novels and have Terry Pratchett playing cameos at the end. Oh, well...
It's a wonderful sendup of those horror movies in which the AntiChrist is born and the end of the world is nigh, only in this one the AntiChrist baby goes to the wrong family and grows up more or less normal. I believe it was meant, originally, to be a sendup of the William stories by Richmal Crompton - that was Neil Gaiman's idea, and it was called William the AntiChrist - but it seems to have gone further, much further. And there is the young woman who is a "professional descendant" of Agnes Nutter, the author of the world's only truly accurate book of prophecies, who knows the world is going to end, not in New York or Paris, but in a little village in the south of England. And there are the demon who tempted Adam and Eve and the angel with the flaming sword from Eden(he gave them the sword to keep warm with). They've both been living in Earth since the beginning and don't want it to be wiped out, so are trying to stop Armageddon. And the Four Horsemen, one of whom is Death as we know him from Discworld.
Hilarious stuff, and if I'm not laughing out loud these days I'm laughing inside.
I definitely don't regret this reread and if you haven't read it, what are you waiting for?
I have one of the early copies of Good Omens that doesn't have the extra bits with the authors talking about each other and how they started it and sent each other floppy disks and yelled excitedly over the phone. Some of it is in the Terry Pratchett collection A Slip Of The Keyboard anyway, but my e-copy of GO has the lot. It's kind of sad to think that when they finally did dramatise it, they did a radio play, which is unlikely to turn up here, instead of a film or even one of those telemovies that are based on the Discworld novels and have Terry Pratchett playing cameos at the end. Oh, well...
It's a wonderful sendup of those horror movies in which the AntiChrist is born and the end of the world is nigh, only in this one the AntiChrist baby goes to the wrong family and grows up more or less normal. I believe it was meant, originally, to be a sendup of the William stories by Richmal Crompton - that was Neil Gaiman's idea, and it was called William the AntiChrist - but it seems to have gone further, much further. And there is the young woman who is a "professional descendant" of Agnes Nutter, the author of the world's only truly accurate book of prophecies, who knows the world is going to end, not in New York or Paris, but in a little village in the south of England. And there are the demon who tempted Adam and Eve and the angel with the flaming sword from Eden(he gave them the sword to keep warm with). They've both been living in Earth since the beginning and don't want it to be wiped out, so are trying to stop Armageddon. And the Four Horsemen, one of whom is Death as we know him from Discworld.
Hilarious stuff, and if I'm not laughing out loud these days I'm laughing inside.
I definitely don't regret this reread and if you haven't read it, what are you waiting for?
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