Today’s challenge: A book that makes you laugh.
The first one that immediately popped to mind was this one, although it was followed quickly thereafter by Douglas Adams’ HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE books. I’m going with Gaiman & Prachett because I actually encountered Adams’ stuff as a TV show before I ever read the books, so I still tend to think of them that way.
Speaking of television, Neil Gaiman is currently in South Africa, filming the forthcoming adaptation of Good Omens for Television, where David Tennant and Michael Sheen are starring as Crowley & Aziraphale. I have high hopes.
But for me, this is, first and foremost, a book. A book that made me burst out loud laughing with the following paragraph:
“It wasn’t a dark and stormy night.
It should have been, but that’s the weather for you. For every mad scientist who’s had a convienient thunderstorm just on the night his Great Work is finished and lying on the slab, there have been dozens who’ve sat around aimlessly under the peaceful stars while Igor racks up the overtime.
But don’t let the fog (with rain later, temperatures dropping to around forty-five degrees) give anyone a false sense of security. Just because it’s a mild night doesn’t mean that dark forces aren’t abroad. They’re abroad all the time. They’re everywhere.
They always are. That’s the whole point.
Two of them lurked in a ruined graveyard. Two shadowy figures, one hunched and squat, the other lean and menacing, both of them Olympic-grade lurkers. If Bruce Springsteen had ever recorded “Born to Lurk,” these two would have been on the album cover. They had been lurking in the fog for over an hour now, but they had been pacing themselves and could lurk for the rest of the night if necessary, with still enough sullen menace left for a final burst of lurking around dawn.
Finally, after another twenty minutes, one of them said: “Bugger this for a lark. He should have been here hours ago.”
The speaker’s name was Hastur. He was a Duke of Hell.”
Yeah. With that, I knew I was in good hands.