Reaper Man

I was a bit late coming to Terry Pratchett, to my loss, and the first of his books I picked up was Reaper Man. This was first published in 1991 but it was probably a couple of years after that before I read it.


Living in London there was always a commute to do to get home. Either by the Underground or by bus, if you wanted to see some daylight on the way home. I’d occasionally even take the bus if I was reading a particularly good book and wanted some “me” time to get some extra pages under my belt.

I remember as soon as I started reading Reaper man I was hooked. The easy style or Pratchett’s writing whilst still giving you a very visual image of the characters and the locations, giving Death a voice that was always in CAPITALS and the generally silly names all grabbed me. The one thing that really, really got me hooked was that it made me laugh. And not just that laugh that you do in your head but just remains a smile on your face. Oh no, these were proper laughs. The sort that, when you do them on public transport, people look at you in that peculiar way. But I didn’t care.

I finished that book on the way down to Plymouth to meet up with Sarah and stay over at her folks. At the time we were ‘just friends’. But that’s another story. I spent the three or so hours of the train journey giggling and laughing to myself.

But what is the story about? Well it’s about Death. A being who is charged with collecting the souls of the deceased from the world below, the Discworld. Unfortunately, for Death, he begins to develop a personality and his ‘bosses’, the Auditors of Reality (who I’m sure we all have in our lives), decide that this is not a good thing. So Death gets sent down to the Discworld and becomes a farm hand, by the name of Eric Door, for an aging lady.

However the replacement Deaths, one for each species, don’t work out as the Auditors expected. To make matters even worse the human Death is taking a long time to create. This leaves the Discworld with a growing number of souls with no idea what to do. That is just the start of the problems!

I won’t spoil the book if you’ve not picked it up, and as it was published 19 years ago shame on you and go grab a copy now, so the synopsis shall go no further than this. Terry Prachett is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an author that you should not shout about.

And if anyone does ask, yes, I do vaguely resemble the Librarian.