Good Omens

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch was the 1990 comic novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, two English authors. The plot turns on the arrival of Satan's son and the end of the world, treated as farce, and its premise takes its shape from the 1976 film The Omen, with Adam Young standing in for the film's Antichrist in comic form. The book was written jointly, with the two authors passing drafts between them.

Aziraphale and Crowley have been on Earth since it began: the angel once guarded the Eastern Gate of Eden, and the demon was the serpent in that same garden. Centuries of shared history have left them on friendly terms, and both of them have come to like the human race. Then Hell hands Crowley a baby, the Antichrist, and orders him to exchange it for the newborn son of an American diplomat living in Britain, keeping the substitution hidden from everyone else involved.

The swap is made at a small country hospital by a satanic order of nuns, and it goes wrong, which means the boy the angel and the demon spend the next decade watching is not the Antichrist at all. The two of them agree that the end of the world would be bad for both of them and set out to influence the child, while the real Antichrist grows up in an Oxfordshire village with the wrong family. There is also a completely accurate book of prophecies and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, who have to be gathered before anything can start.

The novel moves between Heaven, Hell, the English countryside and a set of characters who each have a partial view of what is happening. It is a standalone comedy.