I finished Reaper Man this morning. I woke up at 3am and grabbed the book to try and get back to sleep. Unfortunately, the story got quite tense and I “had to” find out how it ended. Yes, I lived off coffee for much of the day but it was worth it.

I loved the book.

I felt it had a quite a different pace than some of the others in the series that I loved. There was something more hesitant about the unfolding of the story of DEATH going “away”, and the consequences of this development.

I also loved that Pratchett twinned DEATH’s story with that of Windle Poons. I have not met many wizards in this series that I like – the Librarian excepted – but Windle Poons really endeared himself to me.

We also get to learn about The Auditors and how the DEATH OF RATS came into being. We get the best kind of romance – and I liked it!

“Picture a landscape, with the orange light of a crescent moon drifting across it. And, down below, a circle of firelight in the night.
There were the old favourites – the square dances, the reels, the whirling, intricate measures which, if the dancers had carried lights, would have traced out topological complexities beyond the reach of ordinary physics, and the sort of dances that lead perfectly sane people to shout out things like ‘Do-si-do!’ and ‘Och-aye!’ without feeling massively ashamed for quite a long time.
When the casualties were cleared away the survivors went on to polka, mazurka, fox-trot, turkey-trot and trot a variety of other birds and beasts, and then to those dances where people form an arch and other people dance down it, which are incidentally generally based on folk memories of executions, and other dances where people form a circle, which are generally based on folk memories of plagues.
Through it all two figures whirled as though there was no tomorrow.”

We get drama, we get action, we get fermented apple juice, and very odd scenes that reminded me of several Dr Who episodes.

I loved the vampires. For some reason, I really enjoy how Pratchett wrote vampires in all of the books that have featured them so far.

But best of all, we get to see DEATH becoming, not human, but becoming the DEATH of the later books.

Brilliant, funny, thoughtful, sad, but never hopeless even though the book does have some really dark moments.

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”