Happy Oktoberfest, everyone!  I’m drinking hefeweisen on an empty stomach.  Let’s see how it affects my spelling and word choice.  This is Part the Third of the three-part Gaiman-thing! Once again, I am borrowing my girlfriend’s copy of this week’s book.  I have left mine at my parent’s house.  For God’s sake, please don’t tell her.

This week, I forced myself to make a tough decision.  I was either going to review Good Omens, a collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, or Marvel 1602, a graphic novel compiling Gaiman’s vision of Europe in the year 1602 if Marvel superheroes had existed back then as they do today.  From this post’s title, you should know which way that decision went.  Still, I do highly recommend Marvel 1602.  I enjoyed it in a way that made me feel uncomfortably geeky.

Our full title this week is Good Omens: the Nice and Accurate Prophesies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.  (Really, I could stop here, because I know you’ve already fallen in love, but I go on!)  This book begins with the birth of the Antichrist, and it just gets better from there.  Aziraphale and Crawly are an earth-dwelling angel and demon, respectively, who have had integral parts in humanity’s development ever since Crawly gave Eve the apple of ill repute and Aziraphale offered the primeval couple his flaming sword on their way out of the Garden.  Unfortunately for their higher-ups, these two have gotten pretty comfortable during their six thousandish years on Earth.  When the infant Antichrist gets accidentally swapped to another family in the maternity ward, neither one of them is too keen on finding him, so he is allowed to grow up in a quiet English suburb.  You did know the Antichrist was going to be English, right?  His name is Adam.

Agnes Nutter, now, she’s an interesting character.  Much of the book revolves around one of her descendants, Anathema, who has lived her whole life by Agnes Nutter’s nice and accurate prophecies.  Understand now that “nice” here is used in the archaic manner, meaning “exactingly precise.”  Agnes was burned as a witch, which she saw coming.  She left the book where the right person would find and save it after her death, all of which she saw coming.  She tried to forestall the end of the world, which she… you get the idea.

Adam, on the other hand, has no bloody idea who he is.  He lives his life in idyllic simplicity, playing with his friends and subconsciously warping the fabric of reality.  Because of his metaphysical position as the agent of doom, his desires become manifest in the physical world.  For that reason, though there have been many highways planned through his town, none has ever been built.  Contractors and planners have gone mad trying to build it, but they’ve all been stymied by events that defy understanding.  Unless you know who lives in the town.

As with Neverwhere, half the fun of this book is just reading the style used to write it.  Gaiman and Pratchett actually wrote it before either one of them was any kind of famous.  One day, they just decided to collaborate.  When it was finished, they were absolutely proud of the story and absolutely certain they would never do it again.  It doesn’t have the same kind of macabre feeling of other Gaiman works, but it does have the same sense of humor.  The characters are too derranged not to be based on real people.  Particularly fun are the Four Horsemen, who serve as the nucleus of an ad hoc biker gang near the end of the book.  The members of this gang are the big four–Death, War, Famine, Polution (replacing Pestilence after the advent of penicillin)–and the other four–Grievous Bodily Harm, Embarassing Personal Problems, Cruelty to Animals, and Really Cool People.

In short, it’s another fun read.  I do highly recommend it for anyone who is a human.