Last week I started rereading GOOD OMENS, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s tale of the apocalypse. The book was published in 1990 but I first discovered the novel in 1997, while on a trip to the McAllen Public Library.
I was thirteen years old and a ravenous reader. Books, comics, magazines, the back of cereal boxes - it didn’t matter what it was as long as it had words and I could get my hands on it. I was just starting to graduate out of the kid’s section of the library and was beginning to explore the sections of books that didn’t have smiling cowdogs or motorcycle mice on the covers. GOOD OMENS immediately caught my attention due to Neil Gaiman’s name. I had read about THE SANDMAN, Neil Gaiman’s adult comic book series, in Wizard Magazine but when I tried to buy a trade paperback collection while at the bookstore a month previous, my mom put the kibosh on that. I was only thirteen and my mom, as she flipped through the book and saw pictures of skinned faces nailed to walls, put her foot down and said I was not old enough for the comic. GOOD OMENS, on the other hand, was a novel. There were no pictures - of skinned faces or otherwise - to be found with a cursory flip through its pages. Jackpot!
I inhaled GOOD OMENS. I put it in a paper bag and huffed the shit out of that book - metaphorically speaking, of course. I finished the book in a couple of days and then immediately reread it, trying to make the most of our time together before I had to return the book to the library. For those unfamiliar with the novel, GOOD OMENS follows an angel and a demon as they stumble their way through an attempt to avert the rise of the antichrist and the coming of the apocalypse. The book - full of witty footnotes and dozens of vibrantly depicted characters - feels at once both dense and breezy. There is so much packed within the book, but it zips along like a speed rail. I was left with a real sense of loss when the book was over - disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to spend more time with the characters I had really grown to love.
I would read GOOD OMENS a handful more times before I graduated high school. The book’s sense of humor slowly became my own sense of humor. It had a major impact on my personality and interests. So much of who I am as a person today was formed that day I picked the book up off the shelf at the library. I’m only lucky that I didn’t start speaking in an affected English accent.
Rereading GOOD OMENS these last few days has made me think about the other books that helped define my childhood. Here, in no particular order, are the most influential books I read before I graduated high school:
THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, Alexandre Dumas
The token “literary” pick. Normally, I hated assigned reading in school. Or in life, in general - it’s why I don’t do book clubs. If somebody tells me to read something, I immediately want to read literally anything else. That said, I read THE COUNT OF MONTE CHRISTO for my tenth grade English class and loved it. It was like a classy version of Batman or THE MASK OF ZORRO. And by classy, I mean you can buy leatherbound editions. This book is pure pulpy fun.
FLETCH, Gregory Mcdonald
The entire FLETCH series is my north star. Gregory Mcdonald’s writing is what I will always aspire to - direct, punchy, effortlessly hilarious. The FLETCH novels are so damn good and I reread at least a few books in the series every year and plan on continuing to do so until the day I die - cause of death likely to be from straining to emulate Mcdonald’s prose. I first searched out these books in the middle of a phase in which I was obsessed with everything Kevin Smith. When Smith was announced to reboot the Fletch series and named the books as to how he learned to write dialogue, I immediately went to the bookstore and bought every FLETCH book I could find. I read the books out of order, but it didn’t matter. They were gold. I don’t care how many YOGA HOSERS Kevin Smith makes, I will always be thankful to Smith for introducing me to I.M. Fletcher.
THE STAND, Stephen King and LONESOME LOVE by Larry McMurty
I’m including these together because I read them both my junior year of high school, almost back-to-back. My teacher in English that year didn’t give us assigned reading. Instead, he gave us a list of authors and a number of pages we had to read by the end of the year. We could pick any book by any author of that list, as long as we hit that page count by the last day of school. I picked the two longest books by two of the authors - in an effort to keep my school reading limited and free up time for comic books and trash paperback novels. THE STAND and LONESOME DOVE both introduced me to the joy of epics. I’m probably as longwinded as I am because of these novels. These books are a commitment to read, but I can’t imagine being the person I am today without having gone on that journey with them.
THE KRYPTONITE KID, Joseph Torchia
One of the last books I remember pulling from the kids’ section of the library - despite the fact that this book definitely did not belong in the kids’ section. The epistolary novel follows a child obsessed with superman in the 1950s. He writes letters to Superman about his verbally abusive parents, his burgeoning sexuality, and his growing depression. His depression mostly rests on the sinking realization that Superman isn’t actually a real person. The novel is a perfect representation of the type of cringe comedy I wrote about a few weeks ago - it’s often very funny but even more often blisteringly sad. I love it.
REDWALL, Brian Jacques
I read a handful of Brian Jacques’ REDWALL series while in middle school. I would have read more if I didn’t become self-conscious about reading books with sword-carrying mice on the cover as I entered high school. Screw insecurities, though - I love these little warrior mice something fierce. This is a series I’ve been dying to reread. I’ve been kicking around a story idea I want to write that’s my homage to the REDWALL series. I just love little woodland creatures learning how to be deadly. See also the RATS OF NIMH series.
YOUTH IN REVOLT by C.D. Payne
Another epistolary novel. I really liked those as a kid. I don’t remember exactly how I heard about YOUTH IN REVOLT for the first time, I just remember it somehow wound up on a list of books I wanted to read and I specifically drove out to Barnes and Noble to look for a copy. As luck would have it, there was one copy left at the store. Wildy enough, a friend from school was also at B&N that same night looking for that same book and was pissed when she saw me holding the last copy. She tried to convince me to let her get the book instead and I was given a chance to prove that, when push comes to shove, I’m actually not that great of a friend. Only three pieces of literature made me laugh out loud as a kid: GARFIELD comic strips, SUPERFUGE, and YOUTH IN REVOLT. This book is so cussing funny. Or at least I remember it being really funny. I’m a little nervous about revisiting it. I also just discovered today that there have been eleven sequels - including two written in the last year!
FIGHT CLUB, Chuck Palahniuk and HIGH FIDELITY, Nick Hornby
Ah, yes - the required readings for any ‘80s-born teenage male. At least AMERICAN PSYCHO isn’t on this list, am I right? But seriously, I don’t care if these books are cliches, they were a huge part of my teenage years and they helped me figure out and define a lot of my interests as a young man, and - for better or worse - also informed the way I talk about my interests. These books were a big part of my high school years and a lot of my writing in my teens and twenties ended up being a bad (and tragically un-self-aware) parody of Chuck Palahniuk and Nick Hornby.
NEVERWHERE and STARDUST, Neil Gaiman
Along with GOOD OMENS, these books formed the holy trinity of fantasy for teenage Rob. I could never get into high fantasy like LORD OF THE RINGS. A college roommate once tried to get me WHEEL OF TIME and I struggled for eight months to make my way through that phone book of literary pain. Seriously, Robert Jordan almost made me give up reading altogether. I have nothing against high fantasy or those that like their dragons with a side of “forsooth!” but that just ain't my bag. I like fantasy, but I need fantasy books to have a gateway character - somebody from the “real” world who stumbles into the fantastical. I need to be held by the hand and walked into a world where goblins and orcs and elves live. Neil Gaiman knows how to deliver that type of fantasy and these three books are my own personal preciousnesses.
THE TOOTH FAIRY, Graham Joyce
I remember when DARKNESS FALLS came out in 2003, thinking that it was an adaptation of Graham Joyce’s dark tooth fairy novel. Boy, was I wrong. But Joyce’s novel is probably unfilmable - a dark and sexual story about a boy who meets the Tooth Fairy and then proceeds to have sex with it. It’s kinda like Shaun Hamill’s A COSMOLOGY OF MONSTERS. Real classy horror. The kind you read with a glass of tea and a growing nervousness that any moment you’re going to sport an unexpected erection. “Wait, I’m into that!?!?”
ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY, David Sedaris
David Sedaris taught me a few things: A) It’s okay to lie about your childhood as long as you make it funny. (Okay, so I don’t have proof that David Sedaris makes up stuff for his books but, come on, there’s no way any single person had that funny of a childhood.) B) Your family will eventually forgive you if you insert them into your literature. Right? Right? David Sedaris was responsible for the big shift into non-fiction I took after high school. I went almost six years without reading any fiction - mostly because I was devouring (and writing) the type of stories that Sedaris wrote. Sedaris is a funny, funny guy and I’ll always be grateful for this first introduction into his writing.