4.3
The classic collaboration between the internationally bestselling authors Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, which will soon be an original series starring Michael Sheen and David Tennant. The world will end on a Saturday, according to Agnes Nutter's The Nice and Accurate Prophecies, Witch (the wo... rld's only fully accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before it exploded). In fact, next saturday. Just before supper. So the Good and Evil armies are accumulating, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring up. Everything seems to go according to Divine Plan. With the exception of a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon—both of whom have lived among the mortals of Earth since The Beginning and have become rather fond of the lifestyle—they are not really looking forward to the coming Rapture. And it seems that somebody misplaced the Antichrist.
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William morrow paperbacks
Mar 5, 2019
9780062697257
Paperback
English
384
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
412 Pages
English
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
491 Pages
English
Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They'd been brought up to it, and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow. Anyway, being brought up as a Satanist tended to take the edge off it. It was something you did on Saturday nights.
And the rest of the time you simply got on with life as best you could, just like everyone else.
God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who
smiles all the time
.
Hilariously naughty, and just what you'd expect from a collaboration between comics-veteran Gaiman and fantasist Pratchett (Strata, 1981; The Light Fantastic, 1983). A best-seller in England, and a book to watch here. It could catch on with the Douglas Adams crowd.
It was a collaboration that was beautifully symbiotic and definitely worth reading. I am surprised this hasn’t been picked up and made into a movie yet. It would take the right director to give it the right spin and it would have to be cast perfectly.
I would recommend this to fans of fantasy and horror but most of all I would recommend this to anyone who loves bloody good writing as they will enjoy something truly unique in a much-maligned genre.
Good Omens was, for me, the kickstarter into reading more genre fiction. The setting for the book was our own world, one much less daunting in my school days than most of the worldbuilding, epic fantasy available at the time.
