What to read next
Books Like Good Omens
More poorly managed apocalypses and gods with day jobs.
Aziraphale has a bookshop, Crowley likes a good meal, and neither sees much upside to the end of the world. If they can find the Antichrist, they might be able to call the whole thing off. Somebody has misplaced him.
We looked for more immortals who’d been living among us long enough to have favorite restaurants. A few of these books give somebody a chance to save the world by getting the paperwork right.
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01Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
by Christopher MooreStart with Biff. An angel brings him back from the dead and puts him in a modern hotel to write about the missing years of his childhood friend Jesus. Biff calls him Joshua and thinks an incident with a lizard belongs in the story of the future Messiah. He tells it like somebody catching you up on an old friend.
Moore is much bawdier than Pratchett and Gaiman. If you’d rather leave scripture out of the dirty jokes, start with Year Zero.
02Year Zero
by Rob ReidAliens have been pirating Earth music, and settling the bill would bankrupt them. Their best hope is an entertainment lawyer called Nick Carter, whom they take for the Backstreet Boy. His assistant is annoyed that first contact has come after quitting time. Go here if the part of Armageddon you enjoyed most was the administration.
03Gods Behaving Badly
by Marie PhillipsArtemis meets a woman Apollo has turned into a eucalyptus. The woman works in mergers and acquisitions and wonders how she’s going to call in sick. The Olympians share a crumbling London townhouse where even the hot water is a source of grudges.
These gods make much worse company than Aziraphale and Crowley. The book includes explicit sex and incest, and Apollo punishes a woman for turning him down.
04Coyote Blue
by Christopher MooreSam Hunter sells insurance in Santa Barbara and keeps quiet about the Crow reservation he fled as a teenager. He’s used to talking people around, a skill that gets him nowhere with Coyote, a trickster god who means to help. This one’s a romantic adventure, with violence and a child kidnapping along the way.
05The Colour of Magic
by Terry PratchettFor more Pratchett, follow Rincewind. He has to keep Discworld’s first tourist alive, though the tourist’s luggage, which can walk, seems better equipped for the trip. An innkeeper takes the idea of fire insurance a little too literally. It’s a string of misadventures that carries straight into The Light Fantastic.
06Catch-22
by Joseph HellerYossarian can get out of flying combat missions if he’s insane. Asking to be grounded proves he has the sense to be afraid, so up he goes. Given letters to censor, he signs them as Washington Irving and gives the army a new man to investigate.
This is the bitterest pick. Heller keeps circling back to the men who still have to fly, and some of the injuries are brutal.
07Apocalypse Cow
by Michael LoganBritain’s livestock turn on the humans. A slaughterhouse worker who already worries that the smell of his job has ruined his love life has to survive the outbreak. The jokes are deadpan and the horror is graphic, with gore and sexual material involving infected animals.
08The Rook
by Daniel O'MalleyMyfanwy Thomas wakes up among dead bodies in a London park. She can’t remember her own name, but letters from her former self say she’s a senior officer in a secret agency that handles the supernatural. The woman who wrote the letters anticipates the obvious question. If she could see the future, she’d use it to pick lottery numbers.
The hunt for a traitor drives this one. The pleasure is watching Myfanwy learn what counts as normal in an office where one colleague can have four bodies.
09Breakfast of Champions
by Kurt VonnegutHere’s the wildcard. A car dealer takes a science fiction story as proof that everyone around him is a robot. Vonnegut puts in an appearance as the Creator, but there’s still time for a man to ask his parakeet what kind of funeral he’d like. The jokes are bleak, especially when the book takes on racism and pollution.
10Rivers of London
by Ben AaronovitchPeter Grant takes a witness statement from a ghost and winds up learning magic on the job. He can get so interested in an inscription on a lion statue that a colleague has to deal with the troublemakers herself. Pick this for Peter’s dry account of police work in a city that also has river gods. The murders are gruesome.
Another guide to try
Books like
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
Don’t panic. There are other ways off the planet.
Funny Fantasy and Sci-Fi10 picks
Every book here has a full profile on HahaFiction, with the sources behind it. How we choose books
