Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


As usual, Pratchett starts with a simple joke, and takes you way beyond. When death is given his own hourglass, he gets a taste of what it's like to live on limited time. As usual, his reaction is to turn to the humans he harvests to attempt to understand his impending doom. He takes up farm work as a reasonable alternative to reaping souls. In a parallel story, the wizards of the Unseen University are dealing with a surfeit of life, the obvious result of which is, of course, a shopping mall, complete with evil shopping carts. When the wizards are captured by the mall, a group of reluctantly undead take up the fight. Pratchett's point or moral, for lack of a better term, is not as clear to me in this book as it has been in others, but I definitely got that Death chose not to go quietly, and that we are all better off with a Death who is both interested in and fascinated by us, than a faceless emotionless specter.



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