Good Omens

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Good Omens is the novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman that I read recently and loved to death. Here's a short bit to give you the flavor. In this scene, the devil Crowley, who has been hanging around Earth since the start and is beginning to like it, tells two other devils what he's been doing to promote the plans of Evil. He doesn't really like these two other devils, who are all old school, tempting priests and corrupting politicians. Crowley feels he's an innovator. His great accomplishment was to tie up all the portable telephones in central London for forty-five minutes at lunchtime the other day. His proud announcement is greeted with blank stares:

"What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.

"But you couldn't tell that to demons like Hastur and Ligur. Fourteenth-century minds, the lot of them."

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