Ironically, I believe it’s been confirmed Gaiman wrote most of the kids stuff and Pratchett wrote most of the stuff with the horseman.
Huh, that's interesting. Still seems like the Horsemen concept still had an effect on him though, even if he was already doing the old-gods-updated thing with Sandman.
Edit: Actually, the book itself's afterword says, "The Agnes Nutter scenes and the kids mostly originated with Terry, the Four Horsemen and anything that involved maggots started with Neil."
Novel progress: The Adroan (110k words), Yume no Hime (81k), The Pigeon Witch (40k)
\"lost to time.\" You\'re aware that a lot of people from the 90s are alive, right?
Huh. I had it totally wrong and I apologize. Guess I just assumed that Terry wrote Death.
@Spectral Time: I'm sure he did since Death was his signature character, but the other three were probably Neil's creation.
@Terrie: Well yeah. I was technically born in 1990, although I know that's not what you're talking about. It's just that most readers under 40 won't be old enough to have personally experienced what it's referencing the way a reader at the time would, or might not know some of the subtler details the jokes are based on, even if they've read about the events secondhand.
Edit: E.g. off the top of my head, the jokes about the ducks being trained to expect certain bread from certain types of spies. Reading that, I thought, "Oh yeah, it's like that old movie trope where spies meet in a park."
But of course, someone who actually lived through the Cold War (when there was genuine nuclear espionage, or at least the fear of it) might appreciate that joke on a totally different level than someone my age, who just thinks of it as some moldy old trope from some movies I saw over a decade ago and can't remember the names of.
Novel progress: The Adroan (110k words), Yume no Hime (81k), The Pigeon Witch (40k)Leave a Comment:
Great concepts, execution... not so much.
I love Neil Gaiman. He's hit-or-miss, but damned if The Sandman isn't the best fantasy series I've ever read. I really enjoy Discworld. I love dry British comedy. I even loved the TV adaptation of this book: best show I'd seen in years, even though it had its own flaws. So naturally, I'd love this book.
...But I didn't. I really, really didn't. "Hated" is too strong of a word, but it was rough going.
I know this is unfair, but having watched the show first ruined it for me: It was the perfect Pragmatic Adaptation, punching up the jokes and characters while trimming a lot of the filler, even if it made some weird choices with the ending.
But I think that even taken alone, there's a lot here that doesn't work. It has some really cool and inspiring ideas, but the execution is just meh.
The head-hopping was interesting, but it was weighed down by too much detail. Large portions of it become a blur of Narrative Filigree, which works in Discworld, but for some reason, doesn't in a realistic-ish modern setting.
Everyone raves about how funny it is, but IDK, a lot of the jokes fall flat. It's not all the writers' fault: Some of the Ripped from the Headlines ones have been lost to time or don't translate overseas, and others that were fine in 1990 come off as a bit racist or sexist now. But they were writing it for its time and place, not Americans 31 years later.
The jokes suffer just as much from their own delivery, though. In trying to cram one into every paragraph, the book throws a lot of witty lines at the wall at random, and IMO most don't stick. A lot of them are labored too: It'll deliver a punchline, then keep going for paragraphs, trying to one-up it but watering it down instead. And the sequences with The Them are basically episodes of Kids Say the Darndest Things that go on for about 10,000 pages, grinding the plot to a halt each time.
There were moments of outright brilliance, though. Having a kid's fantasies become real on a global scale was cool. Modernizing the Four Horsemen was a fantastic idea that must've laid the foundation for what Gaiman would later do in American Gods. The early-modern English was nearly spot on. And some lines and descriptions were genuinely great, which is what kept me going through the rest.
And some of the problem is a case of "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: It makes some great points about the arbitrary nature of good and evil, which I'm sure were radical at the time, but many other writers have made them since. Pratchett himself nailed the same concept a year later with Small Gods, which is part of why this seems lacking in comparison.
I know most people don't agree with me on any of this, though, which is why it's considered a comedy classic, so feel free to ignore it.