Once More With Footnotes

I saw the hat. As if subconsciously aware of the bad hatitude, he used to forget it and leave it behind in restaurants. One day, he never went back for it. I put this in for the serious fans out there: if you search really, really hard, you may find a small restaurant somewhere in London with a dusty grey h omburg at the back of a shelf. Who knows what will happen if you try it on?
     
                  Anyway, we got on fine. Hard to say why, but at bottom was a shared delight and amazement at the sheer strangeness of the universe, in stories, in obscure details, in strange old books in unregarded bookshops. We stayed in contact.
     
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                  [SFX: pages being ripped off a calendar. You know, you just don't get that in movies any more ...]
     
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                  And one thing led to another, and he became big in graphic novels, and Discworld took off, an d one day he sent me about six pages of a short story and said he didn't know how it continued, and I didn't either, and about a year later I took it out of the drawer and did see what happened next, even if I couldn't see how it all ended yet, and we wrot e it together and that was Good Omens. It was done by two guys who didn't have anything to lose by having fun. We didn't do it for the money. But, as it turned out, we got a lot of money.
     
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                  ... hey, let me tell you about the weirdness, like when he was staying with us for the editing and we heard a noise and went into his room and two of our white doves had got in and couldn't get out; they were panicking around the room and Neil was waking up in a storm of snowy white feathers saying, "Wstfgl?" which i s his normal ante-meridian vocabulary. Or the time when we were in a bar and he met the Spider Women. Or the time on tour when we checked into our hotel and in the morning it turned out that his TV had been showing him strange late-night semi-naked bondage bi-sexual chat shows, and mine had picked up nothing but reruns of Mr. Ed. And the moment, live on air, when we realised that an under-informed New York radio interviewer with ten minutes of chat still to go thought Good Omens was not a work of fiction ...
     
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                  [Cut to a train, pounding along the tracks. That's another scene they never show in movies these days ...]
     
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                  And there we were, ten years on, travelling across Sweden and talking about the plot of American Gods (him) and The Amazing Maurice (me). Probably both of us at the same time. It was just like the old days. One of us says, "I don't know how to deal with this tricky bit of plot;" the other one listens and says, "The solution, Grasshopper, is in the way you state the problem. Fancy a coffee?"
     
                  A lot had happened in those ten years. He'd left the comics world shaken, and it'll never be quite the same. The effect was akin to that of Tolkien on the fantasy novel — everything afterwards is in some way influenced. I remember on one U.S. Good Omens to ur walking round a comics shop. We'd been signing for a lot of comics fans, some of whom were clearly puzzled at the concept of "dis story wid no pitchers in it," and I wandered around the shelves looking at the opposition. That's when I realised he was go od. There's a delicacy of touch, a subtle scalpel, which is the hallmark of his work.
     
                  And when I heard the premise of American Gods I wanted to write it so much I could taste it ...
     
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                  When I read Coraline, I saw it as an exquisitely drawn animation; i f I close my eyes I can see how the house looks, or the special dolls' picnic. No wonder he writes scripts now; soon, I hope someone will be intelligent enough to let him direct. When I read the book I remembered that children's stories are, indeed, where true horror lives. My childhood nightmares would have been quite featureless without the imaginings of Walt Disney, and there's a few little details concerning black button eyes in that book that makes a small part of the adult brain want to go and hide b e hind the sofa. But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror's defeat.
     
                  It might come as a surprise to many to learn that Neil is either a very nice, approachable guy or an incredible actor. He sometimes takes those shades off. The leather j acket I'm not