Neil Gaiman is an old favorite of mine. American Gods, Coraline, Stardust, all of these titles and more happily keep company with each other on my Kindle. I appreciate his style; the biting wit, the vaguely absurd humor, and the simple, effectiveness of his prose. He is a talented writer, so I knew going in that Good Omens was going to be something I'd enjoy. However, up until this point, I had never read anything by Terry Pratchett, so I was eager to get a feel for an author that I've seen so highly praised.

Good Omens is a humorous tale of a mismatched group of people, angels, demons, and personified concepts attempting to facilitate (or halt) the end of the world. Throughout, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman poke fun at the concept of good versus evil, at Christianity and witchcraft and Satanism. In line with typical heavy-handed satire, the pair of writers hit you over the head with their message; that humanity is all that is good or evil in the world, and that the real apocalypse comes from the indifference of man to their impact on the world as a whole. Considering the state of the world at the moment, where the environmental disasters mentioned in this book have hit a much more urgent danger level, the message of human indifference is particularly timely.

Gaiman and Pratchett wrote well together; the cohesion among all the different parts of this novel make it impossible to decipher what was written by Gaiman and what was written by Pratchett. The story is a decent one, but I think the best part about it all was the names. Seriously, I loved the names in this book, although only as they appear in fiction. Anathema Device, Newt Pulsifer , Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery Pulsifer , and of course, good ole Agnes Nutter. I love the names so much. They make for delightfully memorable people, even if the absurdity takes away from realism. Honestly, I've never read anything by Gaiman expecting realism anyway, so I don't mind.

I rated Good Omens as 4-stars because I thought it was a very readable, entertaining book. However, as with a lot of stuff that is written for laughs, there is a distinct lack of depth to the characters. They are written to be very one-note caricatures, and the fact that the book jumps around to follow so many people makes it hard to see anything in them beyond their singular purpose. I prefer my apocalyptic books to deal with the internal dramas of people in the midst of the end of the world, but this book is more action than feelings based. That's not a bad thing, but it does weaken the book when it comes to my personal enjoyment.