one of the best of the series | Reaper Man (Discworld)

Everything We've Come to Expect | Reaper Man (Discworld) | Terry Pratchett

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	• Reaper Man (Discworld) Terry Pratchett Trafalgar Square Publishing, 1996 average customer review:based on 105 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Readable, but somewhat disappointing

The Auditors of Reality are unhappy with the Death of the Discworld, who has shown signs of individuality and - shudder - a personality. They decide to fire Death and recruit a replacement. Death accepts this decision stoically, and decides to spend his last few days of existence sampling life, adopting the alias of handyman Bill Door and going to work on a remote farm.

Unfortunately, Death's absence causes some anomalies. Windle Poons, the oldest wizard on the Disc, is upset to discover that, despite dying, he can't move on to the next life. As a result, he has to spend the interim as a zombie but, thankfully, he finds some help from Ankh-Morpork's resident undead rights movement. At the same time, an unusual plague of odd novelty items is afflicting the city. The wizards of Unseen University investigate and discover that something rather unusual is taking shape outside the city walls...

Reaper Man is, in the sometimes complicated hierarchy of Discworld novels, the second book to feature Death in a major role (following on from Mort and running ahead of Soul Music) and the first to feature the Unseen University wizards in a major role (although, confusingly, many of them appeared in a supporting capacity in Moving Pictures and the Librarian has been around since The Light Fantastic). Some of the City Watch (from Guards! Guards!) also crop up.

This slightly complicated arrangement probably adds to the schizophrenia of the novel. In all of the Discworld books prior to this, the storylines usually converge at the end and the story is usually quite focused. Reaper Man instead sprawls, with Death/Bill Door's adventures and the subplot of the wizards/Windle Poons not really gelling together. There is a vague link between them, but otherwise the two stories don't really intertwine, resulting in a rather disconnected feeling to the book. This is added to by the wizards stuff being quite funny and the Death stuff being quite serious (the advent of the Death of Rats aside).

Pratchett is also pursuing another satirical target here, following on from films in Moving Pictures and police procedurals in Guards! Guards! Unfortunately, the target is rather weak - Pratchett apparently doesn't like shopping malls, hates muzak and isn't keen on combine harvesters - and there's a distinctly half-hearted feeling to proceedings here. The book never really seems to come together and fire up like the best books in the series, despite many individually good moments and some funny lines. Ultimately this appears to be a case of Pratchett trying to be serious and even moving but also trying to throw some chaotic comedy into the mix as well, and it doesn't work. It's notable that when Pratchett separates the two out - as he does in the double-whammy of the more serious Small Gods and the funny Lords and Ladies - he does very well, but the mix here does not work as effectively.

Reaper Man (***) is readable and interesting, but definitely one of the less successful books in the series. It is available now in the UK and USA.

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one of the best of the series

I admit it, I am a hopeless Disc World fan. That said, this is one of the more enjoyable books of the series and has made Death one of my favorite characters. It' *fleshes* him out quite well and Disc World fans will not be disappointed.

Everything We've Come to Expect

This is another strong work showcasing the zany characters and situations from discworld. There are tons of things to be introduced to: new societies, new characters, new info on the nature of discworld, new Gods, new locals, new almost everything. In all honesty, it's a bit too much new. There are more things going on in this book than normal(and that's saying something for a Terry Pratchett novel), which makes it hard to keep up with multiple story arcs, esoteric descriptions of events, and all the new characters.

It was more loosely written; usually, everything at the end is tied up in a nice little package with all story elements coming together in a harmonious ending. This novel had way too many loose ends floating around to reach that level. This novel still reaches an amazing level of humor though with several sections being exquisite laugh-out-loud moments. I would still recommend it, even though it might not be the most tightly spun Pratchett novel I've read.

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Man, Reaper Is Funny

I never really read funny fiction while growing up. Perhaps it was due to a generally introspective temperament. Maybe it was because those kinds of stories don't typically garner mainstream accolades. I even might owe it to teachers and librarians simply failing to put the right sort of book in my impressionable hands. Whatever the reason, the extent of my foray into humorous storytelling was pretty much limited to James and Deborah Howe's Bunnicula, which features a vampire rabbit that drains vegetables dry. Cute, but I soon moved on to Very Serious Books, the sort that may break your heart or raise your righteous ire, but won't ever make you laugh. Now having read Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man many years and volumes later, I'm beginning to think restricting myself to those highfalutin titles left a large gap in my literary education.

Death has a problem. The tripartite emptinesses called the Auditors of Reality have convinced the galaxy-swallowing entity named Azrael that Death doesn't know what he's doing. Why? Well, the problem's right in front of you -- that word "he." Death shouldn't be a "he," the Auditors argue. "He" implies personality, and personality only causes problems. It's time for a replacement. So much to his chagrin, Death learns that he's soon going to, well, die. An awkward situation, but Death decides to make the best of it. He certainly isn't going to spend his remaining time drudging away at his day job. No, he's going to live it to the full, which causes some problems for 130-year-old wizard Windle Poons. Poor Windle really ought to have shuffled off the proverbial mortal coil by now, but try as he might he can't seem to perish. It's up to him and a motley crew of undead to try and restore the natural order of things.

Though I hadn't encountered any of the massive Discworld series prior to Reaper Man, I knew Pratchett's oeuvre was almost uniformly funny. What I didn't know was how many sorts of humor he could squeeze into a single book. You might compare the approach to painting a room with dynamite. Pratchett wraps subtle ironies, outright absurdities, corny one-liners and cheesy puns around a hexogen core, then splatters every page with them. You run into crotchety mayflies, nostalgic pine trees, suicidal zombies, existentially challenged embodiments of destruction, gastronomically obsessed wizards, peddlers who sell what that don't (in the strictest sense) actually own -- and that's only in the first fifty pages. You have to read on to get to the amorous weremen, bashful bogeymen, carnivorous piles of compost, predatory shopping malls and orangutan librarians. Sure, the approach can feel a little scattershot at times, but that doesn't make it any less delightful. Who knew Death could be hilarious?

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Not perfect, but nonetheless filled with many extraordinary moments

Most Terry Pratchett Discworld novels have a number of plots, and in this one I absolutely loved the A plot with Death getting fired and taking a job as a farm hand, I enjoyed the B plot featuring an elderly wizard who finds himself continuing to exist as a kind of zombie after Death's firing, and didn't care much for the C plot of magics going wrong due to the fragmentation of The Death into many smaller Deaths.

For most Discworld fans there are two recurring characters (apart from the members of the Watch) who provoke perpetually delight, and who luckily are in most of the books: the Librarian and Death. Although the Librarian has only a small role in REAPER MAN, from the title you can tell that it is mainly about Death himself. So, although some of the plotting isn't up to Pratchett's usual standards, the book is hugely entertaining simply from the presence of death. The book also has some of his best and most humorous prose, with some great zingers and some genuinely moving passages. How can you not love bits like Death being asked if he can dance, and his replies, "I am famous for it."

Unfortunately, the next novel in the series concerns the witches. I can't say that the witches are my favorites in the Discworld. The Wizards are usually pretty good, Death is always a winner, and the Watch is the best. But the great thing is that all of it is at least good.

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A Discworld novel. Death is missing. Dead Rights activist Reg Shoe suddenly has more work than he'd ever dreamed of, and newly-deceased wizard Windle Poons wakes up in his coffin to find that he has come back as a corpse.