Good Omens - Neil Gaiman Page 0,134
a boot … no, imagine a sneaker, laces trailing, kicking a pebble; imagine a stick, to poke at interesting things, and throw for a dog that may or may not decide to retrieve it; imagine a tuneless whistle, pounding some luckless popular song into insensibility; imagine a figure, half angel, half devil, all human …
Slouching hopefully towards Tadfield. …
. . . forever.
About the Authors
TERRY PRATCHETT is the internationally bestselling author of more than thirty books, including his phenomenally successful Discworld series. His young adult novel The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents won the Carnegie Medal, and Where’s My Cow?, his Discworld book for “readers of all ages,” was a New York Times bestseller. Named an Officer of the British Empire “for services to literature,” Pratchett lives in England. (He has drunk enough banana daiquiris, thank you. It’s G & Ts from now on.)
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NEIL GAIMAN is the critically acclaimed and award-winning creator of the Sandman series of graphic novels and author of the novels Anansi Boys, American Gods, Neverwhere, Stardust, and Coraline, the short fiction collections Fragile Things and Smoke and Mirrors, and the New York Times bestselling children’s books The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls. Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States. (He is still 5’11” tall and continues to be partial to black T-shirts.)
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HEAVENLY PRAISE FOR
Good Omens
“Full-bore contemporary lunacy. A steamroller of silliness that made me giggle out loud.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
“Something like what would have happened if Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, and Don DeLillo had collaborated on the screenplay of a remake of the Jack Benny film The Horn Blows at Midnight. … It’s a wow. … It would make one hell of a movie. Or a heavenly one. Take your pick.”
—Washington Post
“It reads like the Book of Revelation as penned by Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”
—Phoenix New Times
“Terrifically entertaining.”
—Dayton Daily News
“A direct descendant of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
—New York Times
“Outrageous. … Good Omens shouldn’t be pegged into a category. It should just be enjoyed. … Read it for a riotous good laugh.”
—Orlando Sentinel
“The Apocalypse has never been funnier.”
—Clive Barker
“What’s so funny about Armageddon? More than you’d think. … Good Omens has arrived just in time.”
—Detroit Free Press
DEVILISHLY GOOD REVIEWS FOR TERRY PRATCHETT …
“A master of laugh-out-loud fiction.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Terry Pratchett seems constitutionally unable to write a page without at least a twitch of the grin muscles. … [But] the notions Pratchett plays with are nae so narrow or nae so silly as your ordinary British farce.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
“Pratchett is well able to combine the hilarious with the topical, acerbic, and incisive.”
—Toronto Star
“A top-notch satirist.”
—Denver Post
“Terry Pratchett may still be pegged as a comic novelist, but … he’s a lot more. In his range of invented characters, his adroit storytelling, and his clear-eyed acceptance of humankind’s foibles, he reminds me of no one in English literature as much as Geoffrey Chaucer. No kidding.”
—Washington Post Book World
. . . AND NEIL GAIMAN
“A writer imbued with rich storytelling qualities and a boundless imagination.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Neil Gaiman is a writer to make readers rejoice.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Gaiman is fast becoming one of the most important of modern writers.”
—Denver Rocky Mountain News
“Gaiman is a trickster in the best sense of the word.”
—Houston Chronicle
“He is a treasure house of story and we are lucky to have him.”
—Stephen King
“When you take the free-fall plunge into a Neil Gaiman book, anything can happen and anything invariably does.”
—Entertainment Weekly
Facts
GOOD OMENS, THE FACTS
(or, at least, lies that have been hallowed by time)
Once upon a time Neil Gaiman wrote half a short story. He didn’t know how it ended. He sent it to Terry Pratchett, who didn’t know, either. But it festered away in Terry’s mind and he rang Neil about a year later and said: “I don’t know how it ends, but I do know what happens next.” The first draft took about two months, the second draft took about six months. Quite why, we don’t know, but it did include explaining the jokes to the American publishers.
WHAT WAS IT LIKE WORKING WITH NEIL GAIMAN/TERRY PRATCHETT?
Ah. You have to remember, you see, that in those days Neil Gaiman was barely Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett was only just Terry Pratchett. They’d known one another for years, Neil having done an interview with Terry in 1985, after the first Discworld book came out. Look, it wasn’t a big deal, okay? At no point in the whole thing did