I recently reread both Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Douglas Adams is one of my favorite authors and I enjoy rereading his works over and over again because each time I do something in them catches my fancy in a way that didn't the last time I read it. There are a lot of little tangents to dutifully follow in his books and they often lead to dead-ends that somehow still must be followed to reach the final destination. I enjoy rereading g his books because I discover dead ends now and again that weren't there before. A prime example of this is when Kate meets Thor again for the second time.
"She didn't go straight home but set off instead in the opposite direction to get some milk and bin liners from the small corner shop in the next street. She agreed with the gentle-faced Pakistani who ran it that she did indeed look tired and should have an early night, but on the way back she made another small diversion to go and lean against the railings of the park, gaze into its darkness for a few minutes, and breathe some of its cold, heavy night air. At last she started to head back toward her flat. She turned into her own road, and as she passed the first streetlamp it flickered and went out, leaving her in a small pool of darkness.
That sort of thing always gives one a nasty turn.
It is said that there is nothing surprising about the notion, for instance, of a person suddenly thinking about someone he hasn't thought about in years, and then discovering the next day that the person has in fact just died. There are always lots of people suddenly remembering people they haven't thought about for ages, and always lots of people dying. In a population the size of, say, America, the law of averages means that this particular coincidence must happen at least ten times a day, but it is none the less spooky to anyone who experiences it.
By the same token, there are light bulbs burning out in streetlamps all the time, and a fair few of them must go pop just as someone is passing beneath them. Even so, it still gives the person concerned a nasty turn, especially when the very next streetlamp they pass under does the same thing" (Adams, 116-117).
His law of averages paragraph is a total dead end; we got there, turned around and found Kate again in the very next paragraph; but, after having re-found her we understand her feeling all the more richly because of our brief jaunt to the end of a street that had nothing to do with our plot journey. We meander along with Adams and getter a fuller landscape of his world than if he simply took us from point a to b.
Another part in the book that really struck me this time is when Dirk met a god in the King's Cross station and suddenly noticed that god's awful smell. "The air which he unsettled as he stood, which flowed out from the folds of his skin and clothes, was richly pungent even to Dirk's numbed nostrils. It was a smell that never stopped coming at you - just as Dirk thought it must have peaked, so it struck on upward with renewed frenzy till Dirk thought that his very brain would vaporize" (Adams, 168-169). I just thought this part was very funny when I read it.
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