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Characters that appear in Good Omens. For character tropes that are specific to the 2019 series, go here.

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Angels and Demons

    Aziraphale 

Aziraphale (An Angel, and part-time rare book dealer)

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/goodomens.png
"Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide."

The angel who guarded the gates of Eden with a flaming sword, Aziraphale has lived among humans for thousands of years, and has become quite fond of them as a result. Due to his friendship with Crowley and all those years among free-willed mortals, he's not quite as pure-hearted as he should be.


  • Badass Bookworm: Owns a bookstore, and while that's what he truly enjoys, he is still a soldier of Heaven and expected to fight in the coming Apocalypse.
  • Beware the Nice Ones: See those men who try to persuade him to sell his store by alluding to how much of a fire trap it could be? They never come to bother him twice...
  • British Stuffiness: He seems very English, in the stuffy, fussy, "oh dear" way, although he's also prone to fretting over things. It's one of the first things people notice about him, although it's not technically true; "Heaven is not in England, whatever certain poets may have thought."
  • Chronic Hero Syndrome: He will fret, he will worry, but whenever Aziraphale is in a position to help, he will help, however inconvenient this gets. He "loses" Flaming Sword (read: gives it away to the humans so they can warm themselves and pretends before the All-Knowing to have lost it) and insists on helping Anathema and fixing her bike despite Crowley's urging to go on their own business already.
  • Collector of the Strange: Bibles with interesting misprints, books of prophecy (preferably signed) and Wilde first editions.
  • Cosmic Plaything: Ineffably so. He and Crowley spend most of the novel attempting to avert the Apocalypse, but when it comes down to it, the most significant work in stopping it was that of Anathema, Newton, and the Them. In the epilogue, Aziraphale and Crowley speculate that the last few days' events had been the actual divine plan all along.
  • Demonic Possession: Angelic possession, rather. His spirit surfs to a few people attuned to be mediums, hijacking their bodies for a time.
  • Disco Dan: Unlike Crowley, he doesn't try very hard to keep up with trends throughout history. His wardrobe is from the fifties, he refers to The Velvet Underground as "be-bop", and the narration mentions that he only ever learned one dance (the gavotte) and was very disappointed when it went out of style a few decades later.
  • Drink-Based Characterization: When trying to calm himself down after he finds a copy of "Nice and Accurate Prophecies" Anathema lost in Crowley's car, Aziraphale makes himself a nice, old-fashioned cup of cocoa, exactly like the sort of a human he's pretending to be would.
  • The Empath: Aziraphale, when they're trying to find The Antichrist, is puzzled when he doesn't detect any evil in the area; the only thing he senses is pure love.
  • Energy Beings: Being an angel, body is optional for him.
  • Fish out of Temporal Water: Aziraphale hasn't updated his wardrobe since the 50s. His general behaviour is also more or less from that era.
  • Flaming Sword: Well, he used to hold one as the guard of the gates of Eden. He gave it away to Adam and Eve after they were banished, because they were defenseless and cold and he wanted to help keep them warm. It becomes a Running Gag that he keeps telling his superiors that he "misplaced it". Becomes a Chekhov's Gun later on when War receives it, and eventually The Them use it to defeat three of the horsemen (well, bikepeople).
    25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying 'Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?'//
    26 And the Angel said, 'I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.'//
    27 And the Lord did not ask him again.
  • Friendly Enemy: With Crowley. They're basically enemies in name only.
  • Friend to All Living Things: He tries to be, but sometimes he smothers a dove by mistake.
  • Go-Karting with Bowser: An angel frequently having meals, getting drunk with, and all around hanging out with a demon.
  • Going Native: Like Crowley, after spending so much time on Earth, he winds up liking it more than the alternative.
  • Good Is Not Dumb: Stuffy, fussy, polite, occasionally absent-minded angel-slash-small-business-owner, underestimated by the representatives of property developers who think they can scare him by describing how his bookshop could burn down. He listens to them cheerfully and politely sends them on their way, and they never return.
  • Good Is Not Nice: He's aligned with the forces of good, but also perfectly willing to do some quite unscrupulous and unpleasant things if it's needed to save humanity. And don't threaten to burn his shop. The most notable is that he's totally willing to shoot a living human child in the face to stop the apocalypse – and not as a last resort or because it's necessary, but because it's the easiest way of ending everything. He's only stopped by the resistance of the human woman he's currently sharing a body with.
  • Gosh Darn It to Heck!: He doesn't swear. Well, he does. Twice.
  • I Can't Dance: The only dance he knows is the gavotte. Being immortal, he doesn't bother trying to keep up with the modern dances.
  • Innocent Bigot: Despite all evidence to the contrary, and despite basically considering him a friend, he's still convinced that Crowley is incapable of feeling love or loyalty, simply because he's a demon. To him, it's not prejudice, it's just a fact. In complete fairness, it's supposed to be, but Crowley's been around humans too long.
  • I Resemble That Remark!: Shadwell calls him a southern pansy. Aziraphale later asserts that he is not just a southern pansy, he is The Southern Pansy.
  • Know When to Fold 'Em: Tries to convince Heaven to stop the war once, but quickly realizes there's no point.
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia: After the events of the climax, like most characters in the book, he forgets what happened.
  • Let's Get Dangerous!: When given back the Flaming Sword. "Once you learn, you never really forget how."
  • Light Is Not Good: He's an angel, and he's quite keen on following the rules where reasonable, but his love of the human world causes him to become dissatisfied with Heaven and ultimately turn on them.
  • Meaningful Name: "Aziraphale" does not end with "-el" or "-on", the common elements of angelic names — this is a clue that Aziraphale stands on Humanity's side instead of other angels' side.
    • It is also an anagram of "Izaraphel" (also known as "Raphael" in Christianity and Judaism or "Israfil" in Islam), the angel that will, according to the Quran, play his horn when the Judgement Day comes. Aziraphale is the complete opposite of it, he wants to stop the apocalypse.
  • Mind over Matter: He is capable of changing reality with his thoughts (for instance, his repair of Anathema's bike), though he is often rather bashful about it if someone points out that he's done so.
  • Mistaken for Gay: It's stated that pretty much everyone's first impression of Aziraphale, among other things, is that he's "gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide". Him hanging around with Crowley all the time certainly doesn't help.
  • Mugging the Monster: Members of The Mafia who threaten his bookstore mysteriously fail to do so again. He probably doesn't harm them, but there's always that ambiguous little possibility...
  • Mundane Utility: Less so than Crowley, since just wishing clothes into being doesn't sit well with him, but Aziraphale is using his superior angelic intelligence to keep his tax records so incredibly perfect that tax office people think he must be hiding something.
  • Murder Is the Best Solution: He's the one to suggest killing the Antichrist.
  • No Biological Sex: "Angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort." He superficially appears male, though.
  • Odd Friendship: With Crowley. Stuffy angel and stylish demon.
  • Pet the Dog: Yes, from an angel, and one he feels vaguely guilty about—he "lost" his flaming sword because he gave it to Adam and Eve, feeling sorry for them.
  • Platonic Life-Partners: With Crowley. Neither of then has a sexuality in the first place, and they're Mistaken for Gay (gay couple, that is) as a Running Gag.
  • Playing with Fire: Aziraphale makes a traffic ticket spontaneously combust. And back when he guarded the Garden of Eden, he had a flaming sword.
  • Precision F-Strike: He swears twice in one chapter, which the book points out is something he hasn't done in six thousand years.
  • Punch-Clock Hero: Not doing a lot to actually destroy the forces of Hell. He actually agrees with Crowley that, if Heaven wins, things would be boring.
  • Sue Donym: Ezra Fell and A. Ziraphale
  • Really 700 Years Old: Only a tiny bit older than the Earth itself.
  • Screw Destiny: As an angel, he's supposed to be working towards Armageddon. He has other ideas.
  • Spell My Name With An S: He's called "Azraphel" in a 2007 Italian translation.
  • Staying Alive: Well, he's not mortal, so he can't die—he just gets discorporeated.
  • Sweet Tooth: He seems to like hot chocolate as much as he likes liquor.

    Crowley 

Crowley (An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards)

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/crw.png

Crowley was the Serpent who tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden. Having lived on Earth for the past six thousand years, he's become rather fond of humanity. His friendship with Aziraphale means he's not quite as evil as a demon should be, though he was never very evil to begin with.


  • Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: Being a demon, he swears in that way. "Oh for Go- Sa- Somebody's sake!" Also uses "Bless!" instead of "Damn!", or at least tries to. Alternately, "Manchester!"
  • Been There, Shaped History: Responsible for several low-grade acts of evil in his time on Earth, after helping cause the Fall of Man, such as Glasgow, Manchester, and a good chunk of television. Or so he claims.
  • Blow You Away: Crowley toys with the idea of conjuring up a hurricane to eliminate rival job applicants.
  • Care-Bear Stare: When filling in Aziraphale's job, which he does sometimes to maintain the status quo.
  • Catchphrase: "Ciao!"
  • Cool Car: The Bentley, which proves sturdy enough to keep in one piece even when on fire and being moved solely by Crowley's magic.
  • Cool Shades: Which he wears all the time. It emphasizes his shady nature.
  • Cosmic Plaything: Applies to Crowley just as much as it does to Aziraphale.
  • Crazy-Prepared: Keeps a container of incredibly deadly (to him) holy water just in case.
  • Dark Is Not Evil: He's a demon, and he doesn't mind a bit of evil here and there, but he quickly becomes disaffected with the forces of Hell since they are so boring. He prefers the human world.
  • Deadly Prank: The bucket over the door filled with holy water trick. Subverted when he turns the paintball ammunition into actual bullets, because he also uses his powers to ensure that no one actually dies as a result. Apart from his entry in the Dramatis Personae, this is one of the earliest hints in the novel that he's really not particularly evil.
  • Death Glare: When deployed by Crowley reality tends to realign accordingly.
  • The Determinator: He manages to hold his flaming wreckage of a Bentley intact through sheer force of will in the climax.
  • Drives Like Crazy: Something of a speed demon. He never actually hits anyone (anyone the plot doesn't need him to hit), but it's really not for lack of opportunity.
  • Energy Beings: Converts to energy to travel through a phone line.
  • Even Evil Has Standards: After getting praise from downstairs for his work in Spain, despite not having worked there recently, he went there to find out about this thing called the Spanish Inquisition that the humans created all by themselves without any hellish influence. After finding out, he drank himself into a stupor.
  • Evil Is Petty: The type of evil he likes to inspire in people; nasty, petty, small-minded little cruelties fueled by bad tempers and off days. It doesn't require much work on his part to get to thousands in this way, and — in his opinion, the best part — people will come up with the evil themselves. People are so much more creative than demons.
  • Face–Heel Turn: Crowley is one of the fallen angels, but it turns out that he's not really all that evil. It's less that he became evil, and more that he just hung out with the wrong people. It's right there in the Dramatis Personae introduction:
  • Fallen Angel: The book calls him this right in his Dramatis Personae introduction, as stated above. Or, rather, not so much Fallen as Sauntered Vaguely Downwards. Later we learn that, while fallen, he's not a terribly bad guy.
  • Felony Misdemeanor: Crowley's immediate superiors are rather underwhelmed by his demonic accomplishments (i.e. traffic jams and telemarketers) in the mortal world. It's something of an example of quality vs. quantity, with his superiors focusing on the former and Crowley the latter because Crowley believes the former is outmoded.
  • Friend to All Living Things: He seems to switch between idly resurrecting suffocated doves and trying to drown ducks. Note that he only really tries to drown ducks when Aziraphale is around to tell him he has to stop. This seems to run on the same sort of logic of "well, if we go out to dinner together, we're both technically stopping the other from doing good/evil deeds, and therefore doing our jobs"
  • Friendly Enemy: With Az. They're closer to friends than enemies, but on paper are still foes.
  • Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: He's for a demon, he's really rather friendly and reasonable.
  • Glamour Failure: His Hellish Pupils, his snakeskin boots that might be his feet and his tendency to hiss when he forgets himself.
  • Glowing Eyes of Doom: When he's using his demonic power.
  • Go-Karting with Bowser: Hangs out with an angel. A lot. All things aside, he and Aziraphale really are quite good friends.
  • Going Native: After living on Earth for thousands of years, humanity has started to rub off on him.
  • Guile Hero: Neutralizes two much more powerful demons by outwitting them, the latter with a ploy he made up on the spot.
  • Healing Hands: Breathes life back into a squashed dove.
  • Hellish Pupils: Quite literally. They burn when he's using his demonic power.
  • Heroic Spirit: He holds his burning car together through sheer force of will.
  • Holy Burns Evil: Although holy water would destroy him in a very nasty and painful manner, he keeps a flask of it in his apartment (in a very large safe, the kind designed to keep nuclear material secure). It proves useful in defending himself against Hastur and Ligur, when they come to "collect" him.
  • I Gave My Word: A demon of his word. Hell is pretty proverbial for enforcing its agreements.
  • Indy Ploy: Does this when the Dukes of Hell are after him.
    Plan A had worked; Plan B had failed. It was time for Plan C. The problem was that he had only ever planned as far as Plan B.
  • I Need a Freaking Drink: When he was contacted by his superiors and complimented on The Spanish Inquisition, he went to Spain to try to figure out exactly what it was he was taking credit for. He then came back and spent a solid week either drinking or passed out.
  • Improvised Weapon: Occasionally uses a tire iron to good effect.
  • Inhuman Eye Concealers: Wears Cool Shades to hide his snakelike Hellish Pupils from humanity — and also because he has a fantastic sense of style. They melt away during his climactic charge across the burning M25, leaving the snake eyes unmasked.
  • In with the In Crowd: His Start of Darkness. It's stated that Crowley "...didn't so much fall as saunter vaguely downwards.", and that he only really picked up with Lucifer's rebellion because his friends did and he didn't really have anywhere else to go.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's in very deep denial for most of the book about actually being a kind of sweetheart.
  • Knight in Sour Armor: Fairly cynical, and he probably loves the world in no small part because it has so much fun stuff in it - but he still loves it and wants it to continue existing. He's also quite sarcastic.
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia: Like most of the characters in the book, he doesn't remember the events after the resolution.
  • Laser-Guided Karma: His beloved car ends up totaled when he has to drive it through the M25... after said highway starts emanating a bizarre and dangerous energy field. Which he set it up to do.
  • The Legions of Hell: Works for Hell. Not the average worker, though.
  • Lovable Rogue: As a fallen, well, sauntered-vaguely-downwards angel, he's a rouge by definition. He is also quite lovable and quirky.
  • Lovable Traitor: He's a traitor to the forces of Hell. For which most of the rest of the characters in the book would be quite thankful, if they knew who he was. He's also quite a lot of fun.
  • Meaningful Name: Crowley, a reference to occultist Aleister Crowley. It also references his original role as the serpent ("Crawly") that tempted Adam and Eve. For a large part of the book, it's insinuated that Crowley actually is Aleister Crowley. It turns out the initial "A." actually stands for "Anthony".
    • "Crowley", nowadays, is also an unusual, but still human surname. This shows that Crowley is actually on the side of Humans, not Hell.
  • Mind over Matter: When he needs his Bentley to drive, it drives, even if it happens to be a burnt-out ruin at the time.
  • Minion with an F in Evil: More like a Minion who's actively trying to fail the Evil class. He's good at his job, but doesn't want to be too good because he likes being on Earth.
  • More than Mind Control: Temptation. In his own words, he looks into people's minds and gives them what they really want. If people wants such dreadful things so often, well, is that his fault?
  • Mundane Utility: Unlike Aziraphale, he has no qualms about wishing whatever he needs into being, including fuel for his Cool Car. He also uses his demonic powers to keep said car in mint condition.
  • My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Doesn't see eye to eye with the rest of the demons.
  • Nerves of Steel: Given that he can keep driving his Bentley while it's on fire. Which, we might note, requires his psychic powers for him to continue doing.
  • Noble Demon: A literal example, from one standpoint. However, despite being a demon, he's not actually a villainous character.
  • Only Sane Employee: He's seemingly the only demon who considers planning in the long-term, believes subtle acts of mass-corruption are the way forward and thinks that the Apocalypse is a bad idea for business. He also tried to introduce technology to Hell, thinking it would be a better way to contact him. Unfortunately, instead of adopting telephones like he'd wanted, they instead decided to contact him through his car radio, satanically twisting whatever he was listening to at the time.
  • Staying Alive: As an angelic being, he's body-optional, thus pretty much unkillable. Unless dunked in holy water.
  • Tall, Dark, and Snarky: A lot more sarcastic than his angelic friend.
  • Talking to Plants: Crowley's habit of talking to his houseplants does make them grow better, but that's because he intimidates them with death threats if they don't.
  • That Poor Plant: Crowley is one of the premier window gardeners in the world... because he keeps his plants in a state of perpetual fear of him. His favourite motivational tool is to flush one down the toilet in front of its peers.
  • Voluntary Shapeshifting: He transforms into... something lovercraftian to scare the paintball guy into fainting. Aziraphale thinks the maggots were over the top.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: Like all demons, holy water will destroy him.
  • Winds of Destiny, Change!: He can cause "miraculous near escapes".

    Hastur 

Duke Hastur (A Fallen Angel and Duke of Hell)

A Duke of Hell and a nasty piece of work.


  • Energy Beings: Converts into energy in order to travel through phone lines, as, for angels and demons, size and shape are options.
  • Fish out of Temporal Water: 14th Century mindset, as is typical for demons not named Crowley. He's slightly better at it that Ligur, since he knows what cars are.
  • Holy Burns Evil: Holy water could and would have totally destroyed Hastur, if any had splashed off Ligur when it destroyed him.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Accidentally performs a minor act of good by hideously murdering an entire room of telemarketers as stress relief, thereby inadvertently preventing them from causing a wave of low grade soul tarnishing from irritation, and as a result making the world a slightly better place than it should've been (to allay much sympathy, they're shown to be holding sweepstakes on what people are doing when they call, ranging from "in the tub" to "having sex").
  • Properly Paranoid: At one point, it's mentioned that Hastur is paranoid, which is in fact a very reasonable thing for a denizen of Hell where everyone really is out to get you.
  • Sophisticated as Hell: While threatening Crowley, he finds the language of Hell not adequate to the task of illustrating how doomed Crowley will be, and has to resort to human euphemisms.
    Hastur: You're going to get taken to the bloody cleaners!
  • Spanner in the Works: Setting fire to the Order's hospital, because demons legitimately think this is clever, which sets Aziraphale and Crowley's search back.
  • Voluntary Shapeshifting: Like all angels and demons, "size, and shape, and composition, are simply options." He's able to shrink down small enough to zip along a telephone line, get stuck in an answering machine tape, and then emerge from a telemarketer's headset as an eldritch horror:
    "But then something climbed out of the earpiece. Something very big, and very angry.
    It looked a little like a maggot. A huge, angry maggot made out of thousands and thousands of tiny little maggots, all writhing and screaming, millions of little maggot mouths opening and shutting in fury, and every one of them was screaming 'Crowley.'
    It stopped screaming. Swayed blindly, seemed to be taking stock of where it was.
    Then it went to pieces.
    The thing split into thousands of thousands of writhing gray maggots. They flowed over the carpet, up over the desks, over Lisa Morrow and her nine colleagues; they flowed into their mouths, up their nostrils, into their lungs; they burrowed into flesh and eyes and brains and lights, reproducing wildly as they went, filling the room with a towering mess of writhing flesh and gunk. The whole began to flow together, to coagulate into one huge entity that filled the room from floor to ceiling, pulsing gently.
    A mouth opened in the mass of flesh, strands of something wet and sticky adhering to each of the not-exactly lips, and Hastur said:
    'I needed that.'"
  • Weaksauce Weakness: Being a demon, holy water.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: After escaping from Crowley's answering machine and snacking on Morrow and associates, we never see him again.
  • The Worm That Walks: When he crawls out of Lisa's phone, he takes the form of thousands upon thousands of maggots joined together in the shape of a giant maggot.

    Ligur 

Duke Ligur (Likewise a Fallen Angel and Duke of Hell)

Likewise a Duke of Hell, and an equally nasty piece of work.


  • Fish out of Temporal Water: 14th Century mindset, as is typical for demons not named Crowley. He's actually even worse than Hastur at this because he doesn't even know what a car is.
  • Holy Burns Evil: Ligur is destroyed (not just "inconveniently discorporated") when Crowley's bucket-of-holy-water-over-the-door-prank catches him on his way into Crowley's flat:
    "The bucket teetered, then fell neatly on Ligur's head.
    Drop a lump of sodium in water. Watch it flame and burn and spin around crazily, flaring and sputtering. This was like that; just nastier.
    The demon peeled and flared and flickered. Oily brown smoke oozed from it, and it screamed and it screamed and it screamed. Then it crumpled, folded in on itself, and what was left lay glistening on the burnt and blackened circle of carpet, looking like a handful of mashed slugs."

    The Metatron 

The Metatron (The Voice of God)

An angelic being who serves as the voice for the otherwise absent God.


  • Good Is Not Nice: Is very insistent the Apocalypse has to happen.
  • Mondegreen Gag: The Them briefly get confused and think they're dealing with a "Megatron".
  • Mouth of Sauron: With God evidently absent from affairs, and never one to give a straight answer even when around, the Metatron serves as His voice. A footnote explains it's like being a presidential spokesperson.
  • Not So Stoic: Typical Heavenly grace and stoicism can't last in the face of Adam's... Adamness, and apparently the Metatron takes on the typical face found on those who listen to his train of thought for any length of time.
  • Spell My Name with a "The": The Metatron. Not "Metatron".

The Four Bikers of the Apocalypse

    Collectively 
  • Badass Biker: All the horsemen now use motorcycles rather than horses.
  • Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Very literally and overtly. But Horsepeople, actually, because one's female. And not actually horses either: they ride motorcycles now.
  • Humanoid Abomination: Initially more on the human side, thanks to three of them having been born, essentially, from mankind. Once it looks like Armageddon is truly underway, the human part sloughs away, leaving them looking like living personifications of what they are, save Death, who remains entirely unchanged, and in comparison looks more human than them (since, after all, every human has a skeleton in them). It also comes with the little side-effect they have problems holding on to basic intelligence. Even speaking becomes an issue.
  • Perception Filter: They don't usually bother with it, showing up just as is, but they do to get into the Tadfield airbase.

    Death 

Death a.k.a. Azrael

Biker: You're Hell's Angels, then? What chapter are you from?
Death: Revelations. Chapter six.

The greatest and leader of the Horsemen.


  • Ambiguous Situation: His true identity is Azrael, who is the angel of death in Judaism and Islam, and he is described as having wings. However, he seems to be a third party from either the angels of Heaven or the fallen angels of Hell and is outright described as a fundamental aspect of universe rather than an employee in the celestial order.
  • Archangel Azrael: Towards the climax he reveals that, in spite of his position with the Four Horsemen, he is not like the others. Whereas his three companions are more or less manifestations of facets of humanity, Death is actually the angel Azrael, with wings of darkest blackness and dotted with lights that aren't stars.
    I am Azrael, created to be creation's shadow. You cannot destroy me. That would destroy the world.
  • Badass Fingersnap: Manages to kill (as it were) all the alarms in the Tadfield airbase by simply snapping his fingers.
  • Bold Inflation: He speaks IN ALL CAPS, WITH NO QUOTATION MARKS.
  • Celestial Body: His wings are described as black holes cut out of space with a scattering of lights gleaming in the darkness, which might be stars or might be something else entirely.
  • Don't Fear the Reaper: He's not as kindly as other personifications of death created by the same authors, but he's not truly malicious or destructive, and only seems to be going through with the apocalypse because he must be there. Once the other three are defeated, he leaves without putting up any fight. In the epilogue, he's briefly seen feeding ducks in the park.
  • The Dreaded: The other Bikers feel unnerved around him, comparing it to workers hanging out with the boss — they like him, but he's not exactly the sort of person you'd go down the pub with either.
  • Expy: Of Death from Pratchett's Discworld series. They're practically the same character and even use the same manner of speech, except that the Good Omens death is less benevolent than the Discworld version (though still not actually evil, unlike the other three Horsepersons).
  • The Faceless: The only member of the Horsemen who keeps his helmet on, hiding his face until the climax.
  • Glowing Eyes of Doom: The delivery man, upon dying, is described as "falling through a grey mist, and all he could see were two spots of blue, that might have been eyes, and might have been distant stars."
  • The Grim Reaper: He's the Anthropomorphic Personification of death.
  • The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: War has a moment where she privately grumbles to herself that for all they're supposed to bring about the end of the world, he's not actually contributing to that, just standing around and yet somehow looking cool while doing it. (Admittedly, his part hasn't actually started by that point.)
  • Skull for a Head: Under his helmet, his head is a bare, grinning skull.
  • Token Good Teammate: He's more in touch with humanity than his comrades and by many leagues the most powerful. The evils of War, Famine, Pestilence and Pollution might someday come to an end, but Death has always walked in the footsteps of life and always will. The others are always a little wary of him.
  • Will Not Tell a Lie: When the bikers gather, Death is busy playing a trivia game he had been winning, until he refuses to answer one specific question, which he knows is inaccurate.
    Death: I don't care what it says, I never laid a finger on him.

    War 

War a.k.a. Carmine Zuigiber a.k.a. Scarlett.

"She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close."

The only female member of the Horsemen. Her colour is red.


  • Blood Knight: She pretty much lives for violence (or perhaps the other way around — violence exists because she lives). Her reaction to receiving her sword was an enthusiastic "finally!".
  • Conflict Ball: She's a walking, sexy Conflict Ball. A small, isolated little town with no prior history of serious violence will, within a few days of her being there, become a war-torn hell hole.
  • Cool Sword: Not fancy, but it looks well-designed for the sort of thing that swords do, which is killing a very large number of people. And it's not just any sword, it's the one Aziraphale gave away. You hand a divine weapon to the two first humans, you don't go expecting a personification of peace to wind up wielding it, do you?
  • Dark Action Girl: As deadly as she is beautiful.
  • Evil Redhead: She's a redhead and she's the Anthropomorphic Personification of war.
  • Femme Fatale: Sometimes she uses her seductiveness to incite men to fight.
  • Finger-Lickin' Evil: Carmine walks out after a bar slaughter between three rebel factions on a war-torn mediterreanean island, licking blood off her fingers.
  • Intrepid Reporter: She used to run arms, nowadays she's a war correspondent. She goes where the wars aren't and has been where wars were. This gives nobody pause.
  • Leg Focus: Her legs are mentioned rather frequently, usually with an adjective such as "long".
  • Let No Crisis Go to Waste: Though technically she causes the crises. Before becoming a reporter, she worked as an arms dealer, and wouldn't you know it, wherever she goes there tend to be people in need of weapons. Especially after she gets there.
  • Male Gaze: Inasmuch as is possible in a print medium; see below. As the personification of conflict and violence, she would naturally be alluring and seductive until you get too close.
  • Louis Cypher: The Red Rider. The names she uses in human form, (Carmine and Scarlett) are both shades of red. She's also introduced driving a red car.
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: She has red eyes, and she's very dangerous.
  • The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: In her guise as Carmine Zuigiber, she's a war correspondent for a trashy newspaper, envied by all the prestigious war correspondents for her ability to always be where the fighting is. However, the National Weekly News she works for vary rarely prints anything she wrote, and even then they have it rewritten to add "human interest", because it's a tabloid mostly concerned with Elvis sightings. They do cash her expense claims, though.
  • Slasher Smile: As her human façade cracks, War's teeth start to gleam "like beautiful bullets."
  • The Smurfette Principle: She's the only female member of the horsemen.

    Famine 

Famine a.k.a. Dr. Raven Sable

The Horseman who has proven most adept at blending in with humanity, in the worst way. Associated with the colour black.


  • And a Diet Coke: He's observed this in his restaurants, and indeed supports it, since his shtick is to starve people. He does that as diet guru (he thinks the supermodel who asked him to sign a book for her has a couple of months to live) and he does that as the owner of both fast food with zero nutritional value joints and fancy, elegant restaurans that serve tiny portions for exquisite prices.
  • Badass in a Nice Suit: He's shown a love for the finer things, like exquisite suits.
  • Beard of Evil: A stylish goatee on an entity who's killing time before the Apocalypse. By killing people.
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: Though there's no sign his business practices themselves are more than typically evil, the products sold are designed more for inflicting suffering than turning a profit, although he may be the only one to realize it.
  • Lean and Mean: As one would expect, he's on the skinny side.
  • Louis Cypher: The Black Rider using two words for "black" as his human alias.
  • Man of Wealth and Taste: He's a wealthy, jet-setting restauranteur and diet guru who also happens to be one of the harbingers of the end of the world.
  • Mean Boss: Resolves to have one of his employees fired for singing while on the job.
  • Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Actually, he never had a doctorate. He's much older than doctors. Knows enough to fake one anyway.
  • Number of the Beast: His street address is spelled out in giant red numbers on his building. The number actually has no significance to him at all, but he finds it amusing to be reminded of the meaning humans assign to perfectly ordinary numbers.

    Pestilence 

Pestilence

The Horseman who retired following the invention of Penicillin.


  • Bit Character: Doesn't actually appear, with his retirement before the novel's events serving to explain Pollution's presence.
  • Light Is Not Good: The "White" Rider before Pollution. It's unknown if Conquest ever existed in this mythology.
  • The Pete Best: In-Universe. Left the Horsemen before the Apocalypse actually happened.
  • Rage Quit: The development of penicillin made his job so much more difficult, he left the Horsemen, leading to Pollution taking his place.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Quit being a member of the Horsepeople in 1936, "muttering about penicillin". Pollution thinks he gave up too early, but doesn't mind taking his place.

    Pollution 

Pollution (a.k.a. Chalky, Mr. White, etc.)

The replacement for Pestilence as the White Rider.


  • Affably Evil: He's wistful and a bit cheery to pretty much everybody.
  • Been There, Shaped History: His total genericness has allowed him to be in all manner of places, such as power plants like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, or the design teams for things like the petrol engine, plastic, and the ring pull can.
  • Cool Crown: His delivery is a silver crown. A few seconds on his head, and it's tarnished completely black.
  • Insult Backfire: There's no point in telling him off about littering, because he loves it when people drop garbage all over the place.
  • Light Is Not Good: The White Rider. His purpose is to bring the world's end.
  • Louis Cypher: His aliases all allude to the colour white.
  • New Job as the Plot Demands: Unlike War and Pestilence, he apparently finds it difficult to keep a job for any length of time, usually because he only sticks around long enough to cause the most environmental damage before moving on.
  • Nightmare Fetishist: Unsurprisingly. He considers a garbage-choked river "so damn beautiful," and waxes lyrical about the biochemical weapons that will get involved once the Horsepeople set off Armageddon.
  • The Nondescript: Most people, when they look at him, don't get any real impression. He's so astoundingly generic he's been able to get into all manner of places, quietly doing something in total anonymity that people will forget he was ever there, and never bother asking where he got to once everything's gone horribly wrong.
  • Perception Filter: He has an ability to make people forget about his presence, which makes it fairly easy for him to get away with his heinous acts of pollution.
  • The Pig-Pen: Anything he touches becomes encrusted with corrosion and filth. Even signing for a package causes the pen to break and spill ink everywhere.
  • Pretty Boy: The narration describes him as one, though with a sinister bent:
    He looked like Victorian Romantic poets looked just before the consumption and drug abuse really started to cut it.
  • The Reveal: For whatever reason, the fact that he's Pollution and not Pestilence is made intentionally ambiguous until the big confrontation. For example, when he signs for the parcel containing his crown, it's noted that his signature is so messy that, while it definitely starts with "P", it's difficult to tell whether it ends in "-ence" or "-tion".
  • Tagalong Kid: The youngest of the horsepersons. Pestilence retired after the invention of antibiotics.
  • Technopath: One of his special gifts is making machines do just what he wants them to do, regardless of fail-safe interlocks or foolproof backups. What the machines do isn't even that consequential, usually, unless you discover they're the other end of a long chain of such inconsequential events that lead to toxic waste disasters and oil spills.
  • Walking Wasteland: Garbage and filth follow him wherever him goes.
  • What a Piece of Junk: His bike is a rusting, janky, oozing thing that looks like it'd fall apart if someone sneezed at it, but it still works regardless.
  • White Hair, Black Heart: His hair is almost fantastically white, and he basically exists to destroy the world.

Humans

    Agnes Nutter 

Agnes Nutter (A Prophetess)

An exceedingly powerful prophet who lived centuries ago, her prophecies drive much of the plot.


  • Awesome, but Impractical: She was the only perfectly accurate prophet in all of history. However... she can only see the things that happen to her descendants. Not only is this pretty useless to everyone else (for example, on 22 November 1963, she predicted a house in the British countryside collapsing, not the JFK assassination... her descendants could've been near that house, but they'd be nowhere near Dallas), it's also pretty useless to her descendants because the predictions generally have very little context. There's also the problem of her almost indecipherable wording choices, which lead to a high number of prophecies only being figured out after they happen.
  • Because Destiny Says So: Happily hops up onto the stake because she knew she was going to die. Or, perhaps, because she's made certain precautions...
  • The Cassandra: No one believed her in her own time, even though she was perfectly accurate.
  • Good Is Not Nice: Even Anathema thinks she was a ornery old hag with a nasty sense of humor.
  • Psychic Powers: She was capable of predicting things that would happen seven hundred years later. Her family just gets the interpretations wrong.
  • Seers: Deconstructed. She may have a perfect view into the future, but she still is a human, and therefore not omniscient. Due to the fact that she's from the 17th Century, she has a hard time putting her predictions into understandable words due to lack of reference. For example, she calls Newt's Wasabi car an "Oriental chariot". Her view into the future was also "a huge picture down a tiny little tube", as Anathema puts it, meaning they're too specific to be helpful and even then, she has a hard time determining the importance of future events beyond what happens to her descendants.
  • Taking You with Me: When the Medieval Morons decide to Burn the Witch!, it doesn't go as planned... as she turned herself into a nail-bomb and took out the entire village when they set her to the torch.
  • The Tape Knew You Would Say That: She leaves very personalized notes for the various lawyers who get custodianship of her bequest to Anathema, threatening to reveal their darkest secrets if they peek. Her prophecies also address specific readers, freaking them out a bit.
  • Thanatos Gambit: She knew of her impending death, took it in stride (and took out those who killed her), and left her prophecies so her descendants will be happy.
  • Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: Parodied. Her descendants often can't decipher her prophecies because of heavy use of metaphors.

    Newton Pulsifer 

Newton Pulsifer (Wages Clerk and Witchfinder Private)

The most junior member of the Witchfinders (as well as second most senior), he sort of stumbled upon the job.


  • Birds of a Feather: He and Anathema both name their (battered, old and unreliable) modes of transportation.
  • Chekhov's Skill: Or lack thereof. To prevent the Apocalypse through destruction of a computer, the way he manages to make it cease to function is to attempt to make it work better.
  • Dating Catwoman: With Anathema. As he puts it, he's a witchfinder and he found himself a witch.
  • Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: About the only thing he's sure of is that his job as a wages clerk may be the most boring in the world. He's gone through several major religions hoping for the "flash of blue light" and didn't have the rock-hard unbelief required to be a real atheist, and only joined the WA because he mistook it for a legitimate home guard.
    Newton Pulsifer had never had a cause in his life. Nor had he, as far as he knew, ever believed in anything. It had been embarrassing, because he quite wanted to believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life. He'd have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he'd have preferred a half-hour's chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. He'd sat in all sorts of churches, waiting for that single flash of blue light, and it hadn't come. And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard, self-satisfied strength of belief even for that. And every single political party had seemed to him equally dishonest. And he'd given up on ecology when the ecology magazine he'd been subscribing to had shown its readers a plan of a self-sufficient garden, and had drawn the ecological goat tethered within three feet of the ecological beehive. Newt had spent a lot of time at his grandmother's house in the country and thought he knew something about the habits of both goats and bees, and concluded therefore that the magazine was run by a bunch of bib-overalled maniacs. Besides, it used the word "community" too often; Newt had always suspected that people who regularly used the word "community" were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew.
    Then he'd tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist.
    To Newt's straightforward mind this was intolerable.
  • Doom It Yourself: As a Walking Techbane, anything he attempts to fix will end up working worse. As mentioned below, he ends up using this to his advantage.
  • Epic Fail: Newt once tried to assemble a joke electrical non-working thingy designed for the most hamhanded tech-deficient beginner; if hitting the on-switch does absolutely nothing, that means it's "working". When Newt finished it and turned it on, it picked up Radio Moscow.
  • The Glasses Gotta Go: Subverted. When he takes his glasses off, he ends up looking less handsome because he keeps running into things and ends up covered in bruises and bandages.
  • Nerds Are Virgins: Implied Trope. During a storm, he is listing things he's never done. He's just seen the prophecy about him and Anathema, and just as Anathema takes him into her arms, the final line is, "I've never—" and then the section cuts off.
    Newt: [after having sex with Anathema] I mean, it was really wonderful. Really really wonderful. I always hoped it was going to be, and it was.
  • Occult Detective: He's one of two remaining Witchfinders in England.
  • Odd Couple: Him and Anathema. She's a witch, he's a witch hunter. She also knows exactly how her life is going to go, while he's never had conviction in much of anything.
  • Tall, Dark, and Handsome: Subverted Trope. Anathema hoped he would be, and he is tall and dark, but not handsome.
    Newt was tall, but with a rolled-out, thin look. And while his hair was undoubtedly dark, it wasn't any sort of fashion accessory; it was just a lot of thin, black strands all growing together out of the top of his head.
  • Unfazed Everyman: Starts out rather unflappable and only gets more and more unflappable as things get crazier. He takes aliens, demons and other result's of Adam's Reality Warping in his stride.
  • Unlucky Everydude: Probably the most normal of the cast, and hilariously unlucky until the end, where he and Anathema become an Official Couple.
  • Walking Techbane: To a truly spectacular extent. As a child, he's obsessed with electricity, machines and computers and desperately wants to be an expert — but destiny has something different in store for him.

    Anathema Device 

Anathema Device (Practical Occultist and Professional Descendant)

The last descendant of Agnes Nutter, Anathema is a witch, hippie, and all around New Age liberal, who makes quite an impression on young Adam. She's also one of the few people with any chance of sorting through the prophecies her ancestress left behind.


  • Aura Vision: An offshoot of her psychic powers. It's somewhat troubling for her when she can't see a certain person's aura.
  • Birds of a Feather: She gives her bike a name, just like how Newt names his car.
  • Because Destiny Says So: Lives much of her life by this, since Agnes' prophecies lay out a fair amount of her life.
  • "Eureka!" Moment: When Newt confesses that he's actually Walking Techbane, Anathema tells him to make the computer systems in the base run better, rather than continue his futile efforts to switch them off. It works.
  • Granola Girl: Anathema is something like this, though she's also portrayed as being a lot more practical and pragmatic than is the norm for the character type.
    Anathema didn't only believe in ley-lines, but in seals, whales, bicycles, rain forests, whole grain in loaves, recycled paper, white South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of practically everywhere down to and including Long Island.
  • In the Blood: The narration notes that she is as close to actually being Agnes Nutter reincarnated as genetically possible.
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia: Like most of the other characters, she has no recollection of the novel's oddest supernatural events in the epilogue.
  • Odd Couple: With Newton. Unlike him, she goes through life with absolute certainty, because it's been nicely and accurately predicted by Agnes.
  • Prophecy Twist: The world doesn't end because there are no more prophecies, there's just another book out there.
  • Psychic Powers: Some prophetic, some Aura Vision. But it's there.
  • Screw Destiny: While it's not explicitly stated, Offscreen Inertia strongly implies that, despite the existence of a second book of prophecies, she ultimately decides not to pay attention to it because, as Newton argues, "Do you really want to be a descendant for the rest of your life?" Of course, Fridge Logic suggests that Agnes would have known this as well, so it's likely to end up being useful to someone, or else she wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of writing it and then making sure it would end up in Anathema's possession.
  • Superpowerful Genetics: A witch, and psychic by inheritance.

    Shadwell 

Shadwell (Witchfinder Sergeant)

The ranking officer of the Witchfinder Army, due largely to being the only officer in the army.


  • Badass Normal: Old, delusional and with a tendency to ramble, but still more than willing to go toe-to-toe with the forces of Hell armed with a Bible, Bell and Candle... or, for that matter, a Ronson lighter, a doorbell and a paperback novel.
  • Dark and Troubled Past: Implied Trope:
    Shadwell: [quietly] I never used to dream when I was a kid.
    Newt: [Newt was aware of skidding around the lip of some deep, unpleasant pit. He mentally backed away.]
  • Dating Catwoman: With Madame Tracy at the end of the book.
  • Foil: As a duo, Shadwell and Madame Tracy are a foil for Aziraphale and Crowley: two people who initially appear to be in conflict, but who after a many years working in close proximity realize they're not so different after all.
  • The Fundamentalist: Almost-but-not-quite Played for Laughs.
  • Funetik Aksent: His grumblings are transliterated quite precisely.
  • Grumpy Old Man: He has a pension and makes frequent use of public transport discounts that come with the status. As for grumpyness, well.
  • Hates Everyone Equally: He's a racist, a sexist, what have you, but no one's really offended.
    Shadwell hated all Southernors, and by inference was standing at the North Pole.
  • Heel Realization: When he has a dream vision of Agnes Nutter's execution, he is at first satisfied because the burning of witches is right and proper, but then he realizes that she is really going to die, and burning to death is a horrible way to go.
  • Instant Dogend: He's smoking constantly, but Newt's never seen the cigarette and just deduces its existence from the way Shadwell cups his hands (and presumably, smells).
  • Mysterious Past: And probably a tragic one at that. He mentions having been recruited into Witchfinder Army while doing time in prison (his cellmate's been a Witchinder convicted of, unsurprisingly, arson).
  • No Full Name Given: If Shadwell has any other name than Shadwell, it's never so much as hinted at.
  • Noble Bigot: Shadwell has a (mildly) derogatory slur for everyone, belittles foreign cultures and religions, and suspects everyone of being a witch or a warlock, yet everyone is charmed by him and he fearlessly prepares to fight Satan when the Apocalypse comes.
  • Occult Detective: Nominally, although his methods of finding the phenomenatrices... phenomina... those things mostly consist of going through all the morning papers and counting nipples. He's also on payroll of Heaven (or Aziraphale) and Hell (or at least Crowley) both.
  • Perpetual Poverty: The Witchfinder army was founded several centuries ago, and for various reasons has never adjusted wages either in relation to inflation or the invention of decimalized currency. He relies solely on payment from Aziraphale and Crowley, neither of whom have a grasp of human economics (Aziraphale from being several centuries out, Crowley from never having had to pay for anything in his life). As a result, he's had to perform some creative bookkeeping just to scrape by, and seems to subsist solely on tins of condensed milk and whatever meals Madame Tracy leaves for him.
  • Saw "Star Wars" Twenty-Seven Times: He's noted to have seen The Devil Rides Out fifteen times, sixteen if you count the time he got thrown out of the cinema for his loud critique of the main character's demon-fighting methodology.
  • The Remnant: For a time, the last of the Witchfinders.
  • Unresolved Sexual Tension: With Madame Tracy, bordering on Belligerent on his end. The end of the novel highly implies that it will soon be resolved, however.
  • Violent Glaswegian: Sort of. Who knows where he's from.
  • What the Hell Is That Accent?: Shadwell doesn't have an accent. Rather, he ping-pongs between all British accents stereotypically associated with unpleasant and mean old men, seemingly at random.
    • Maybe a direct tribute to a single famous British television character — Alf Garnett, played by actor Warren Mitchell in the sitcoms Till Death Do Us Part and In Sickness and In Health. Anyone familiar with the character's physical description, "roaming accent", and personality (he is a comical bigot) will recognize him instantly if they were born and raised in England in the 1970s or 1980s. (However, Alf's accent was fairly firmly in Sarf London, the one area Shadwell never goes near. Make of that what you will.)
  • Would Not Hurt A Child: He is utterly horrified to learn that the Antichrist he was hired to destroy is an eleven-year-old boy.

    Madame Tracy 

Madame Tracy (Painted Jezebel [mornings only, Thursdays by arrangement] and Medium) (Real Name Marjorie Potts)

A fake psychic who works down the hall from the Witchfinders.


  • Dating Catwoman: Winds up dating the highest ranked Witchfinder in England (granted, there are only two).
  • The Ditz: She's not terribly bright.
  • Dominatrix: Implied to be one of her jobs.
  • Foil: As a duo, Shadwell and Madame Tracy are a foil for Aziraphale and Crowley: two people who initially appear very different, but who after a many years working in close proximity realize they're not so different after all.
  • Girls Love Stuffed Animals: Invoked Trope. she keep a collection of threadbare stuffed animals in her bedroom because she has old-fashioned sensibilities about what men consider attractive.
    Madame Tracy's concepts of what was erotic stemmed from the days when young men grew up thinking that women had beach balls affixed firmly in front of their anatomy, Brigitte Bardot could be called a sex kitten without anyone bursting out laughing, and there really were magazines with names like Girls, Giggles and Garters. Somewhere in this cauldron of permissiveness she had picked up the idea that soft toys in the bedroom created an intimate, coquettish air.
  • Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Semi-retired these days, since her clients are the same age she is and tend to prefer a spot of tea or her services as a psychic, but still maintains it as a sideline. No shame about it whatsoever — actually likes it when Shadwell calls her a "harlot" at the top of his lungs, since she considers it free advertising.
  • Not-So-Phony Psychic: She has a few moments of genuine prophecy when Aziraphale is around. And apparently is a suitable vessel for possession.
  • Phony Psychic: She fakes being one for the comfort of her customers, usually just running out the clock because her main customer is a gabby idiot who, if not forestalled, will eat up an entire session filling her husband's ghost in on all the family drama that's happened since her last visit. She's also quite happy for Shadwell's banging and thumping, since she's not quite as able to work some of her 'equipment' as well as she used to.
  • Unresolved Sexual Tension: With Shadwell, as mentioned above.

    Sister Mary 

Sister Mary "Loquacious" Hodges (A Satanic Nun of the Chattering Order of St. Beryl)

A Satanic nun who participated in switching the babies to ensure the Antichrist ended up in properly evil hands.


  • Brilliant, but Lazy: Early on, she figured it was just easier to be stupid than smart, but after the Order goes up in flames, she starts deciding to be smart.
  • Bunny-Ears Lawyer: While, as mentioned below, her airheadedness results in the Antichrist being misplaced for eleven years, she ultimately ends up being extremely competent at business and knowledgable about computers, as described under Dumbass No More.
  • Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Her first appearance definitely qualifies, given her cooing over the baby Antichrist's teensy-weensy little hoofikins (which he hasn't got) and various quirks of her internal monologue. By the time of her second appearance, she has become substantially more grounded in reality, however.
  • Dumbass No More: When Crowley and Aziraphale revisit her eleven years later, she turns out to have discovered herself as a competent manager and to have made the site of her old convent into a successful corporate retreat. Which, somewhat unfortunately for the supernatural duo, means that they have to dodge adrenaline-crazed power-hungry paintball-shooting executives on the way to finding her. The narration essentially explains that she'd never really bothered thinking before because nobody had expected her to, and once the Order was disbanded, she was able to find out who she really was.
  • Freedom from Choice: Part of why she was in the Order to begin with, since she preferred someone else to do the thinking for her.
  • Minion with an F in Evil: She's not really evil, for a Satanic Nun. And she's really bad at the whole evil plot thing.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Her accidental switching of the babies wound up being the best thing that could happen for humanity.
  • Nuns Are Spooky: Subverted. In Crowley's mind Satanic Orders are more annoying than spooky. Mr Young does appear to be rather unsettled by her, however, though he doesn't seem to be able to elucidate why.
  • Punch-Clock Villain: The book goes into detail on how most Satanists aren't any more devoted to evil and Satan than Christians are devoted to good and Jesus, with her as the specific example. The narrative also mentions that she is, above all else, a nurse, which substantially restricts the amount of actual evil she can do.
  • Spanner in the Works: Her incompetence is what caused the events of the book, as she accidentally gave the Antichrist to the wrong family. Then her competence trips up Aziraphale and Crowley a tad because it gets in the way of them relocating him.

    Mr. Tyler 

Mr. Ronald P. Tyler (A Chairman of a Residents' Association)

A very opinionated old man living in Adam's town who encounters its unusual visitors one after another.


  • Disproportionate Retribution: Apparently wanted Dog put down for growling at him.
  • Elephant in the Living Room: Crowley's car when he pulls up to ask for directions. The car's on fire. Mr. Tyler's train of thought keeps turning back to the car being on fire.
  • Entitled Bastard: Common to a lot of his ranting letters is expecting everyone to do what he wants, with the "we who pay your salary" argument a frequent theme.
  • Fat Bastard: Mentioned to be "well-fed".
  • Grumpy Old Man: A pensioner with little to do but complain and yell at people he sees.
  • Ignore the Disability: Well, one's car being in flames while you're driving it is something of a disability, wouldn't you say? But Tyler's not going to say a word.
  • Moral Guardian: Complains about the decline of morals in the youth of today. In one case, those he perceives as "the youth of today" happen to be four harbingers of Armageddon as old as humankind, because they ride motorbikes.
  • The Napoleon: Five foot six, and prone to blustering at everyone else. He is the archetypal fussy little British man.
  • Sex Is Evil, and I Am Horny: Refuses to have a TV in the house because he doesn't hold with it, and because there's all those scandalous movies filled with degeneracy. However, he actually is privately interested in seeing those movies. Just so he knows what he's complaining about, obviously. No other reason.
  • Strongly Worded Letter: Known for sending these to the local paper on pretty much every topic. Including why they aren't printing all his other letters. If he's really worked up on something, he'll be moved to send a letter to the Times.
  • Talk About the Weather: When Crowley rolls up to him in his flaming Bentley, this is the only way he finds himself able to react.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: With everything he encounters up until he meets Crowley.

    Warlock 

Warlock

One of the babies switched with the Antichrist. Perfectly ordinary, though due to some confusing winking, everyone thought he was the spawn of Satan.


  • Eagle Land: His family (and their bodyguards) are quite trigger-happy.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Apparently his father got talked into it by a Satanic nun.
  • Pet the Dog: In an odd way. Adam gives out gifts for everyone when he sets the world to rights. Warlock's life doesn't change, because as far as Adam and Them are concerned, just living in America is already the coolest thing in the world.
  • Royal Brat: Not royal, but the son of a diplomat. And fairly realistically bratty.
  • Switched at Birth: With Adam.

    Mr. Young 

Mr. Young (A Father)

Unknowingly adoptive father of the Antichrist.


    The International Express Man 

The International Express Man

An unusually reliable deliveryman who makes sporadic (but important) appearances throughout the novel.


  • Back from the Dead: Fortunately, someone (most likely Adam) undoes his death at the end of the novel.
  • Badass Normal: There's no clear indication anywhere in the novel that he has any supernatural abilities, but as mentioned under Determinator, he fulfils some particularly demanding jobs without flinching.
  • No Name Given: He's never given a name, only a job description. Became 'Lesley' or 'Stan' in various media adaptations.
  • Stiff Upper Lip: He performs his tasks with stereotypical British stoicism.
  • Unstoppable Mailman: He'll do whatever it takes to make his deliveries. Even if that includes travelling through a war zone — or dying.

    Greasy Johnson 

"Greasy" Johnson

Another occupant of Tadfield, and leader to the closest rival gang of Them.


  • Brick Joke: When the three babies get mixed up, the narration suggests something horrible might have happened to Baby C, or he actually wound up adopted, grew up relatively normal and grew award-winning tropical fish. When Greasy is introduced, it's mentioned he secretly has a passion for tropical fish.
  • Bullying a Dragon: The Johnsonites are some of the few beings to call Pepper by her given name. And then only at a distance, if they're quite sure she can't hear them.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: An awkward, clumsy bully of a pre-teen, the narration suggests he'll eventually settle down, get married and go on to live a perfectly normal life. Benefits of Adam considering him a friend.
  • Oblivious Adoption: The third baby in the switcheroo that begins the plot, and something he has no idea about.
  • Then Let Me Be Evil: Due to his size, general clumsiness and poor scholastic ability, he became a bully mainly in self-defense.

The Them

    Collectively 
  • Balance Between Good and Evil: They discuss this, in a way, in one of their Seinfeldian Conversations. They ultimately conclude that if they were to permanently defeat their rival gang, Greasy Johnson's Johnsonites, they'd probably end up fighting each other, and they conclude that even if they could defeat the Johnsonites, they wouldn't want to. The parallel to the actual looming Armageddon is clearly evident.
  • Four-Temperament Ensemble: Adam is Sanguine, Pepper is Choleric, Wensleydale is Melancholic, and Brian is Phlegmatic.
  • Fire-Forged Friendship: They first met when they were four, and made fun of Pepper's name. One punch up later, and they were friends, and have been ever since.
  • Geodesic Cast/Good Counterpart: They are this to the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (except arguably Adam, since the novel's Death, as in other works by both of its authors, isn't particularly evil). Specifically:
    • Adam to Death: the leader, the most "serious" and inevitable of the group
    • Pepper to War: The Smurfette Principle and Action Girl
    • Wensleydale Famine: having a meticulously neat appearance and being very businesslike in personality.
    • Brain to Pollution: The Pig-Pen
  • Named by Democracy: They tried to give themselves a number of different names over the years, but everyone else always, invariably called them "The Them", so eventually they settled on it too.
  • Seinfeldian Conversation: They do this constantly, though it's arguably subverted in that a lot of the seeming nonsense they're discussing ends up being real in the novel's setting. It's strongly implied that this is actually Adam's doing in most, if not all, cases.
  • Spell My Name with a "The": It's "the Them", not "Them".

    Adam 

Adam Young (An Antichrist)

The Antichrist, the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness. Also leader of a small gang of ruffians and one of the most human people on the planet.


  • Anti Anti Christ: What Aziraphale wants him to be. Ultimately, he does become it, but not in Heaven's name. It's for humanity... which Aziraphale notes may have actually been the idea in the first place.
  • The Antichrist: He's the son of the Devil, born to lead the Four Horsemen.
  • Armor-Piercing Question: On the receiving end of this when his powers really got going and he began aiding in bringing in the apocalyse under the influence of his demonic heritage. He's told the Them that they (and Dog) would be spared from what's to come, and in fact would be given the world to rule, split among the four of them. This later prompts Pepper to ask what part of the world Adam wants, which leaves him quiet briefly before saying all he wants is Tadfield, which the others point out can't be owned by anyone. Adam begins to argue this, before realizing what he's saying (and what he's been doing), in turn leading him to fight his darker instincts and return to normal.
  • Balance Between Good and Evil: Ultimately, he is perfectly human. Neither good, nor bad, but human.
  • Brought Down to Normal: Suggested that he does away with his powers at the end, to reset the world to an approximation of normal. He's still got at least some power. After all, what's "normal" for the son of the Devil?
  • The Chosen One: Subverted. He is the chosen one, but got Switched at Birth so everybody thought someone else was The Antichrist.
  • Conspiracy Theorist: Some of the stuff Adam absorbs from the New Age magazines Anathema lent him falls into this category. He's momentarily stymied in his explanation of all this to his friends when they ask him why the government wants to hush up the existence of aliens; the magazine had just taken it as an article of faith that that's what governments do.
  • Death Glare: Has a particularly cold stare he uses whenever one of the gang has an idea he really wishes he'd thought of first.
  • Dramatic Wind: Happens around Adam when his powers begin to manifest.
  • Drunk with Power: Once his powers manifest and he gets angry with the world.
  • Forbidden Fruit: The penultimate scene of his book, in a deliberate Call-Back to the first scene (as well as the Book of Genesis), depicts him stealing apples, indifferent to the impending punishment this will incur, because "there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got in for eating it."
  • From the Mouths of Babes: There's a lot of wisdom in his words, despite being a kid.
  • Humanity Ensues: As Crowley observes at the climax, he didn't turn out good and he didn't turn out evil, he turned out human, with all that entails.
  • I Know Your True Name/Meaningful Name: It's made clear with Dog that names influence what a thing becomes. It's more subtle in this case, but maybe if anyone in the book had gone on calling him the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness, instead of Adam (which just means Man) then he wouldn't have turned out so perfectly human.
    • Beelzebub addresses him by a word that is described as sounding like "a file dragged down the spine" only for Adam to correct him. Presumably this was Adam's name in the language of Hell, and the one that he was never given.
  • Ignorant of the Call: He has no idea that the forces of Heaven and Hell are out looking for him.
  • The Kid with the Leash: Despite seeming like a normal dog, Dog does still have much of his power. He is also fanatically loyal to Adam.
  • The Leader: A fact the rest of Them are very much aware of. It's Them, and Adam.
  • Meaningful Name: Adam means "man," and was, of course, the name of the first human according to the Bible. In the end, Adam Young isn't good or evil — he's human.
  • My God, What Have I Done?: After the Armor-Piercing Question above, he's horrified that he's been ushering in the end of the world and immediately takes action to stop it before it's too late, recruiting the Them for help.
  • Obliviously Superpowered: Spends his childhood unaware that he's a godlike Reality Warper. With Good Parents and a happy life, all his Power Incontinence does is make his beloved hometown a bit more idyllic and transform a Hellhound into a cute Canine Companion. It's not until the apocalypse begins to heat up that Adam gets the slightest inkling of what he really is...
  • Psychoactive Powers: Do not upset the Antichrist. When he really comes into his powers, reality just squeaks and lies down on its back.
  • Reality Warper: When his powers manifest, he unconsciously makes his beliefs true.
  • Screw Destiny: He's supposed to be the catalyst for the Apocalypse. Like Crowley and Aziraphale, he has other ideas.
  • Shiny New Australia: Dog has dibs on this section of Earth.
  • Slouch of Villainy: He is a prepubescent boy. He's also described as wearing battered sneakers, frayed jeans and a grubby tee shirt.
  • Soapbox Sadie: Becomes one after meeting Anathema and reading some of her magazines. Not the best mix with nascent reality warping powers and a child's understanding of things.
  • Special Person, Normal Name: Adam. Sister Mary did suggest a lot of names to Mr. Young, covering half of Hell and the entire Golden Age of Hollywood, but in the end, the Antichrist got named Adam. It's still a Meaningful Name, though, since he ultimately winds up a perfectly human Anti Anti Christ.
    [Mr. Young] stared down at the golden curls of the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness." You know," he concluded, after a while, "I think he actually looks like an Adam."
  • Try to Fit That on a Business Card: The Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness.
  • You Will Be Spared: When his powers manifest, Adam decides to destroy and recreate the world, bringing about the apocalypse. However, he affirms that his friends and Dog will be spared, allowing them to each rule a portion of the new world.

    Pepper 

Pepper, a.k.a. Pippin Galadriel Moonchild (A Girl)

Daughter of a hippie and angriest of all the boys in town.


  • Action Girl: Emphasis on the "girl" part. She's the toughest in her group of kids, and even goes toe to toe with War using nothing but a wooden sword. Of course, having a reality warper backing her helps that.
  • Berserk Button: Her real name, being treated like a girl.
  • Embarrassing First Name: Pepper's real name is Pippin Galadriel Moonchild. It's also her Berserk Button.
  • Fiery Redhead: Redhaired and tomboyish, and quick to start a fight.
  • Good Counterpart: She's the good counterpart to War, having red hair, being the only female member of the group, and being quick to start fights.
  • Hippie Parents: Her hippie mother lived in a commune and is the reason her name is "Pippin Galadriel Moonchild". Despite or because of this, she's fairly temperamental.
  • Improvised Weapon: Wields a handmade "sword" (a pair of twigs tied together) in the final battle.
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia: Like most of the characters at the end of the book, she does not remember what happened earlier.
  • Man Bites Man: She will bite people who upset her, and often with enough force that requires force to remove her after she bites down.
  • Odd Name, Normal Nickname: "Pepper" isn't necessarily the most normal nickname out there, but compared to her real name, "Pippin Galadriel Moonchild", it's practically Jane Doe.
  • One of the Boys: In reaction to her name, she had to grow up to be very tough. One character mentally describes her as "marginally female." It's strongly hinted that when she isn't around the rest of Them she has much girlier interests, which is something she won't admit to having. Pepper and her friends are still young enough that romantic considerations aren't an issue yet, although the narration notes that the boys are beginning to be vaguely aware of the possibility.
  • Shout-Out: Her names are references to The Lord of the Rings and The Neverending Story, though the latter is likely also a reference to British occultist Aleister Crowley, after whom the novel's Crowley is named.
  • The Smurfette Principle: The only female member of the Them.
  • Tomboy with a Girly Streak: She's very tomboyish and has grown up as being One of the Boys, but it's hinted that she secretly has girlier interests that she won't tell the other Them about.
  • Unusual Pop Culture Name: She hates that her names (after The Lord of the Rings and The Neverending Story characters) stick out and goes by "Pepper".
  • Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Her interesting name comes from being conceived and birthed while her mom was on a nature kick... which lasted for a few months, and ended permanently shortly thereafter. But Pepper's still left with the name, of which there are only two ways to respond.
  • Youthful Freckles: Parodied. Her face is "one big freckle with bits of skin" under it.

    Wensleydale 

Jeremy Wensleydale (A Boy)

One of Adam's friends, who acts more mature than most of the adults in the story.


  • Good Counterpart: He's the good counterpart to Famine, having a meticulously neat appearance and being very businesslike in personality.
  • Last-Name Basis: Nobody refers to him as Jeremy, not even his parents. (They call him Youngster, in the hope that he'll take the hint.)
  • Neat Freak: In contrast to Brian, he's always meticulously tidy.
  • Skewed Priorities: Even when sneaking onto an air force base to prevent the end of the world, he takes the time to lock his bike.
  • Wise Beyond Their Years: "All that separated [him] from chartered accountancy was a matter of time."

    Brian 

Brian (A Boy)

Another of Adam's friends. The smelly one.


  • Good Counterpart: He's the good counterpart to Pollution, being... well, very unhygienic.
  • The Pig-Pen: He gives Pollution a run for his money. He's just perpetually coated in grime, and discarded crisp packets follow him everywhere.

    Dog 

Dog (Satanical hellhound and cat-worrier)

A Hellhound sent to Adam on his birthday. Unlike everyone else, he identified his master with perfect accuracy, which is what alerted Aziraphale and Crowley that something had gone wrong.


  • A Dog Named "Dog": Which basically causes him to become a dog, rather than a hellhound. A little sort of mongrelly terrier thing.
  • Deathbringer the Adorable: He was supposed to be a hellhound, but Adam unwittingly transformed him into a regular dog. Over time, he adjusted to the mundane life of a dog and started to enjoy things like scaring cats and chasing rabbits.
  • Good Feels Good: When the Apocalypse begins, Dog finds himself not wanting to be a Hellhound or for the world to end. Dog likes being a normal dog and chasing rabbits and scaring cats.
  • Hell Hound: His original form. He gets turned into a regular dog by Adam's reality-warping abilities when he hears Adam musing aloud about what kind of dog he'd like to have.
  • Kid with the Leash: The name Dog name changes its nature and it was expecting a name like Terror or Stalks-By-Night — but since it's bound utterly to its master's will it got stuck with being a dog. Complete with cat-chasing, tail-wagging, stick-chewing, face-licking, a funny crooked ear, a lack of size and general small-dogosity. But the hellhound part is still there deep down if you happen to upset its master.
  • Meaningful Name: Adam assigning him a name determines his true purpose (Compare the biblical Adam naming animals). If he had been named Killer, or Walks-by-night, the hound's personality would've changed to match. But then Adam named him Dog, turning him into a fairly normal... dog.
  • The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: His name may have been the final nail in the coffin, but the book makes it quite clear that changing his shape to fit Adam's description of his dream pet was the major contributing factor behind Dog's... doggishness.
  • Sealed Evil in a Teddy Bear: He's a hellhound and still marginally aware of that, but due to being forced into the form of a real dog he's far too easily distracted and excitable to do anything about it.
  • Team Pet: For the Them.


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