I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus

[READ: October 2021] Reaper Man

This book opens unlike any other, with an amorphous group of beings called The Auditors of Reality.  (Well, it opens with a bit about Morris Dancing, which is pretty funny).  The Auditors have no individual personalities (in fact, when One says I (“I hate them”) it is immediately dispatched so a more neutral Auditor can take its place.

The Auditors want to make sure that everything is following the Rules. And what isn’t following the Rules?  Well, Death isn’t following the rules.  Death is developing a personality.  And that cannot happen.  So they fire him.  Yes indeed.

He goes off on his own trying to figure things out.  He winds up getting a job as a farm hand (his reaping skills are unparalleled).  The woman he works for is quite suspicious of him (and everyone in town is quite suspicious of her). Death is caught off guard and when she asks his name he comes up with unsuspicious name of Bill Door.

The woman is Miss Fitworth.  She is an elderly woman (rumored to have a large chest with a lot of money in it).  She had a fiancé who went on a business trip and never came back.  Rumor is that he left her, but she doesn’t believe it.

This is all well and good, but without Death, dead humans don’t know what to do–no one is there to guide them to the afterlife.  So they kind of just keep piling up.  Poltergeists run amok.  And then there is aged Wizard Windle Poons.  He was really looking forward to reincarnation.  But after he died, his spirit just returned to his body.  Of course, since he is dead, he doesn’t have any concern with old age–his sight and strength are better than they have been in years.  But everyone is more than a little freaked out by him.

This leads him to go to the Fresh Start Club, a group run by zombie Reg Shoe.  There’s also some vampires (Count and Countess Notfaroutoe who inherited their vampireness (well, technical his vampire house) through an uncle–no one was bitten).

Meanwhile, a whole bunch of snow globes begin appearing around town.  C.M.O.T. Dibbler gets the great idea to sell them (He never asked things like “Are these yours to sell?”).  The only really odd thing about these globes was the writing on the bottom (the book includes the hilarious chicken scratch: “a pre ent from anKh-morPork.”

This side story is kind of slight, but it has a lot of funny moments and does actually portend the end of Ankh-Morpork.  These Snow Globes are actually eggs for a new life form.  Its middle stage is a shopping cart (which people find remarkably useful when they discover them in the streets in alleys).  But all of this is leading toward its ultimate end: a shopping mall.

This is kind of funny, but Pratchett does actually make a decent argument that shopping malls do cause the death of cities.  There’s an amusing part where everyone keeps hearing music from the mall but it doesn’t really sound like music exactly–it sounds wrong (muzak).

Almost the entire shopping mall story line is handled by the Wizards.  It’s the most they’ve run in years. Heck, it’s the most they’ve been outside of the University in years.  With Mustrum Ridcully now in charge, he brings his hunting prowess to the task of tracking these shopping carts.  With typically magically explosive results.  The relationship between Ridcully and The Dean is really defined here.

While Bill Door has been working hard for Miss Fitworth, two things have been happening.

The first is that Miss Fitworth is kind of falling for him.  There’s a wonderfully sweet moment where Bill Door takes Miss Flitworth to the Harvest Dance. And they have a wonderful time. It’s the best that Miss Fitworth has felt in years.  And during the dance, Bill/Death shows her what actually happened to her fiance.

The second is that a new Death is being formed–an impersonal anthropomorphic entity like he should be.  This second part is far more serious, because new Death’s purpose is to take Bill Door away.  It’s a pretty intense scene.

Meanwhile, all of the other animals had generated their own Deaths.  They can’t exist alongside of Death obviously.  But Death decides to let the Death of Rats live (which is sweet and weird and actually winds up playing an important plot point in a later story).

This book introduces the hilarious character of Mrs. Cake who doesn’t really appear too often in the series but who looms large nonetheless.

Mrs. Cake volunteers at every temple taking over miscellaneous housekeeping duties. Unfortunately, she invariably has a fight with the priests (mostly because she converses with the dead), and then no one can figure out her system of tidying.  In addition to conversing with the dead, Mrs. Cake also has precognition, a very useful too, although premonitions make her conversation with normal people very confusing, because she tends to reply to a question right before it has been asked.  But once the other person realizes that, they must complete the conversation, because of the person doesn’t ask the question, she gets a terrible headache.