Mort
October 5, 2006
"Mort" by Terry Pratchett
HarperTorch 2001 paperback edition
The fourth in Terry Pratchett's dementedly popular "Discworld" series, this is also where things really started to pick up. While "The Color of Magic," "The Light Fantastic," and "Equal Rites" put the series on a good footing, they still show Pratchett's uncertainty about what sort of world Discworld was going to be. And while they were decent entries in the series, they might as well carry a big sticker with "fans only" written on it. "Mort," on the other hand, still stands up to just about anything else Pratchett has written since. In it, the personification of Death decides to take on an apprentice, in the form of the hapless, awkward Mort. Death uses the new free time to try some other professions (his time as a short order cook is especially entertaining) while Mort discovers some of the advantages and disadvantages of being responsible for ending the existence of life. Part of the reason the book succeeds over its predecessors, apart from Pratchett's more confident writing, is that he turns the potentially one-note Death into a complex character. Unlike the previous entries, which relied on the usual tropes of fantasy fiction, an original world is crafted here, allowing Discworld to become more fleshed out.
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