According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact, just before dinner. So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon - both of whom have lived amongst Earth's mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle - are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture. And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist...

 

Let's get this straight from the off, I was extremely disappointed with this book. I absolutely love the individual works of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, but this just didn't hit the mark for me.

 

Just because a book is written by two people it doesn't mean that it needs to feel like it was written by two people. It wasn't in the way that the two styles were dissimilar, but in the way that the story just too choppy; it changed around perspectives an awful lot that it just became extremely confusing for me. You didn't get to spend five minutes with one individual character before it would change to a completely new one, and you didn't get to fully understand what was going on with another character before it would change to yet another one. There were some times where new characters were "introduced" and you couldn't tell whether they were just a background character or an important role because it was happening so much. It wasn't that there were too many characters, but it was that they weren't fully explored like they could have been.

 

Due to the confusion, I didn't feel anything for the characters whatsoever - I didn't get the chance to. There was a development to a certain extent, but with the choppiness of the book it didn't seem gradual, but sudden. The characters were kind of one dimensional as well but to give them some credit they each had their own individual quirks which came with the dialogue that was absolutely on point.

 

The humour in this book was very "British", and for me that was just my cup of tea (no pun intended). I found myself laughing out loud on so many occasions as the dialogue was so witty, and each set of characters had their own personal humour about them - the Them (child gang) were so naively precocious and the angel and demon had so much banter and observational humour to name a couple. The footnotes as well - which are a favourite of mine in Pratchett's novels - were an absolutely delight to read and added the extra bit of humour which is definitely needed on top of the story. Now, this is what I know of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and it's a shame they couldn't have bought some other qualities of their other books to this book.

I really did want to like Good Omens but I just couldn't. Even though I love Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman individually I don't want to be fake and force myself to like something that I just didn't.