Synopsis: Death is given time and goes off to use it. Chaos ensues because without death life cannot move on and in classic Discworld manner life hangs around.

My Thoughts: I think I read my first Discworld novel about ten years ago and it was instant love, and the character I fell the most in love with was Death. Death has always been a bit different from how death should be, sure he has a hood, carries a scythe and is a bit of a skelington* but he also has a contemplative side and he does have family.

When the auditors decide that Death has become a personality contrary to regulations they give him time. And in typical Death manner he goes off to use it. He becomes farm hand Bill Door. Deaths absence as, well...Death, leads to problems for the other Discworld inhabitants, amongst them the Wizards at the Unseen University (or UU one of the few reasons I considered going to Uppsala University was the acronym UU). The Wizards are, erm...special people. Very set in their ways as befits proper Wizards and when one of their own fails to move on they set about solving the problem. However, when Wizards solve problems this tends to create other problems.

Pratchett has a way of seeing society in a way that you yourself could not but when he writes it down you go "oh yeah, of course". One of these incidences comes at the beginning of the book when the Wizards are throwing Windle Poons a death party. It reminded me strongly of the leaving parties that pop up occasionally at work, where everyone pretends to like the person and hope them well but secretly just want to get on with their own lives. The forced jollyness is always palpable.

As with any Pratchett book it is hard to explain what happens without giving away the whole story but I will say that I haven't laughed this much over a book in absolutely ages. ( )

It's a rare book that can explore the fear of death (and undeath), yet ultimately leave the reader comforted. ( )

Terry Pratchett is everything good in the world. That's my own, very non-biased opinion. He's funny and insightful, and every time I read one of his books I think alternately, "I can't believe he said that! That's hilarious!" and "At last, somebody gets it!" ( )

Death goes missing and those who die start coming back without anywhere to go. Newly-dead Windle Poons, a wizard, wakes up in his coffin as a corpse while far away, a tall, dark farm hand is becoming really good with a scythe.

Paper or Plastic?: Imagine, for a second, this reviewer's bookshelves. Let your eye wander; there's the hardcovers, the Vonnegut collection, Asimov heaped carelessly near the top, next to a carelessly tossed collection of old batteries. And there's the Pratchett collection, book after book dealing with the delightfully organic and weird universe of the Discworld. All of the paperbacks are worn from use, but two stand out: Small Gods, which is waterlogged from being dropped in water, stained from coffee, and so helplessly battered that the front cover has fallen off, and Reaper Man, which isn't much better.

Reaper Man is obviously one of my favorite books in the Discworld trilogy. It was also the first: I randomly picked it up around the age of fifteen or so at an airport, because the cover intrigued me. (I possess what looks like th English version, with various characters parading across the cover on and around Death's horse: the black hardcover shown on Amazon looks nice, but the new bland paperbacks being issued now of this one are awful.) Suffice to say, I was immediately hooked, and what a book to start off with when it comes to an introduction to this series. It's held up well.

When we get down to the facts, this is a DEATH novel. In the Discworld, the reaper man has slowly become a full-fledged character, and because he's no longer just an abstract concept, he suddenly decides he doesn't want to do it anymore. (Existential psychosis: the bane of all thinking creatures.) Suffice to say, the powers that be are not happy, and they set out to make things right. Along the way, a recently deceased wizard who gets a second shot at life has to figure out, along with some very entertaining friends, on what exactly is happening with all this 'unreaped' life around...

This is primarily a book about redemption, the second chance, and what it means to be human. If you read this book and want to learn more about the character of death, here is his serial arc in terms of book titles, although, honestly, it's OK to start with Reaper Man:

ERIC , REAPER MAN , SOUL MUSIC , HOGFATHER

He also, of course, shows up quite regularly in other books as a special sort of cameo. Happy reading, I hope this review was helpful to you.