Good Omens was written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s smart and funny and unusual. The book had been on my reading wishlist for a while, but I must admit that what got me to pick it up was the trailer of the series that will premiere at the end of May on Amazon Prime. It will come to the BBC 6 months after that.

Good Omens is about the end of the world. There’s a demon who likes to annoy people, but who also has a soft spot for them. And an angel who wants people to be kind, but who also likes to tease them. And who loves books. A lot.
They have both lived on earth since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of it. While their respective bosses are anxiously waiting for Armageddon (or the great war between heaven and hell and good and evil), they would like things to stay as they are. It’s hard to hide things from God and the Devil, which means that both get in trouble for trying to avoid Armageddon.

The book is a great work of fiction and you can read it as just that and enjoy it immensely.
There is another layer in it though, that mocks the concept of witch hunts and that exposes false dichotomies. In Good Omens, heaven and hell do equal amounts of damage by the absolutism of the ideas that they promote. Both are pushing towards the ultimate battle between good and evil, which they know will destroy the world, regardless of who will be victorious.

You might expect that a book based on the premise of the clever plotting of the end of the world would feel dark, but it doesn’t. The story is always light and funny and it keeps moving fairly quickly. The characters feel very real, and everyone is subtly mocked in equal measures.

While the “about the authors” part in most books is informative at best, in this book it’s almost as entertaining as the rest of the book. Reading about the friendship between Terry and Neil is heartwarming. The way in which they both describe the process of how they wrote Good Omens together is a joy. It even makes writing fiction sound more like fun than just like a lot of hard work in solitude. Perhaps writing together will be the key for me to one day write fiction after all.
I will definitely read Good Omens again and I can’t wait for the series to come to the BBC.