The fourth best book of my adulthood

What do you get when you take several ingredients, each delicious on their own, and combine them? Five of the six friends from Friends would have you believe that you get something to stay away from. (The famous Czech children’s story A Doggie and a Pussycat reaches the same conclusion.) So I don’t know if I’m being Joey, but this particular mixture works for me – and apparently also for the other 600 000+ people on Goodreads with an average rating of 4.25 at the time of writing. Terry Pratchett? Good. Neil Gaiman. Good. What’s not to like?

The fourth place, and the almost medal goes to…

This humorous story is set in the world just before it ends. On a Saturday, if you must know. And, as the blurb says, “someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist.”

I’ve been trying to put together a little intro text for the book and failed the assignment miserably. In the best Pratchett/Gaiman-sense, the storyline is impossible to describe if you still want to sound like a sane person. And the beautiful vivid language makes mine seem clumsy and plain. While reading, I could almost feel the storms and the hot, dusty smell of wheat fields.

The book focuses on an unlikely duo – on the one hand, an angel and rare books dealer Aziraphale, and on the other hand, a demon Crowley who came up with telephone salespeople as a way to draw souls to the dark side. They join together on a mission to save the world while serving you with laugh-out-loud intelligent dialogues:

‘Maybe some terrorist—?’ Aziraphale began.

‘Not one of ours,’ said Crowley.

‘Or ours,’ said Aziraphale. ‘Although ours are freedom fighters, of course.’

Behind the action, it is also a take on nature vs. nurture. What happens when a newborn Antichrist gets switched at birth and grows up in an average family without being educated on your usual things the Antichrist might need to be educated on? And what then happens with a completely normal child who founds himself receiving that influence instead of the Antichrist?

Both authors said they were writing the book to make each other laugh, and it shows. It is without any doubt the best-co-written book I have ever read, and nothing I can write about it will make it justice. A friend of mine, Katka, described it in her Goodreads review much more eloquently, so if the story catches your interest, I suggest that you go read her review here . Here’s just an excerpt from it:

Imagine a sort of a Master and Margarita reborn into the age of fantasy, answering machines and exploding nuclear reactors. It is a rollercoaster-dash-haunted-forest that makes you giddy with excitement, breathlessly expecting what’s going to jump out at you at the nearest turn.

There’s also an excellent BBC Radio 4 dramatization of the story, which I highly recommend. And the book resurfaced in the past few years because there’s a new TV show (and a new audiobook) as well. (Does Neil Gaiman ever sleep?) While I haven’t gotten my hands on any of the new takes yet, I’ve heard the TV show is outstanding.