Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Great idea, great execution, hilarious writing... until the demons of Dialogue and Moral Message rear their heads and prove Pratchett and Gaiman utterly unequal to fighting them. The beginning is very promising and put me in mind of a twisted version of the genius Screwtape Letters; a demon and an angel, neither very enthusiastic about their respective jobs, decide to team up to avert the apocalypse because they're having too good of a time on earth to have it all end. Honestly, I would have been happy to just hear about the exploits of the demon (Crowley) and angel (Aziraphale). There are some absolutely hysterical and inspired parts in the first half, such as Crowley lamenting that his colleagues are still living in the Middle Ages and don't grasp the fact that, with the growing population, an artisan, individual approach to temptation is just no longer applicable, one must think on a mass scale. Unfortunately, everything falls apart when it gets to the human characters. Crowley and Aziraphale are actually the only well-written characters. Everyone else is a disaster. And the romantic plot... well, let's just say it makes Disney channel high school dramas look like Shakespeare. Pratchett and Gaiman have a serious issue with writing dialogue, it's so wooden and artificial, it's painful to read. And the nauseatingly moralistic ending just made the last quarter of the book unreadable for me. But I loved the first half so much that I'm willing to turn a blind eye to much of what follows. If they had not bothered with the whole apocalypse plot at all, but gone with a more episodic style, telling the minor adventures of Crowley and Aziraphale, this book would have been absolutely genius.