Adams, Douglas. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. 1988. New York: Pocket Books, 1990.
          Summary: Dirk Gently series #2. An airport check-in counter erupts in flames, and Dirk Gently is on the case. A different case regarding a guy who seems to have been on the wrong end of a Faustian deal. Turns out that Odin and Thor are feuding, and their conflict is reverberating in the lives of mortals.
          Comments: Well, now I know where Neil Gaiman got the idea for American Gods. Gods created by the imaginations of mortals and then persisting long past their use and sense of purpose, living on the extreme edges of human society. The similarities, right down to the personage of Odin causing all of the problems (though in Gaiman's book it's megalomania, whereas here the goal is an endless supply of clean linen sheets), are striking.
          It's just too bad that the novel itself is decidedly less than entertaining. Even worse, goddammit, than Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. The prose was mediocre and undistinguished, finishing it was an exercise in boredom (took me, like, three days), and I'm really starting to think that life is too short for this shit. Really, the only delight to be had here was at the very end, where Adams's patented vicious humor reemerges--Dirk's unutterably dirty refrigerator becomes a Guilt God that devours the Bad Guys once and for all, and the eagle that has been plaguing Dirk reverts back to its fighter plane self while trapped in Dirk's apartment...then crash-landing in said apartment at the very end. Ha, ha. As if his day weren't bad enough already.
          Notes: mass market paperback, 17th printing
          Rating: 4/10 - NOOOO~! MAKE IT STOP~!!!! Oh, right. It's over. Thank goodness. Too bad that it was the author's own death that ended it. *sighs*