Terry Pratchett's Discworld 09- Eric

Eric

Corgi

Terry Pratchett
Art by Josh Kirby
1990

Other Terry Pratchett Reviews- The Colour of Magic - The Light Fantastic - Equal Rites - Mort - Sourcery - Wyrd Sisters - Pyramids - Guards! Guards! - Eric - Moving Pictures - Reaper Man - Witches Abroad - Small Gods - Lords and Ladies - Men At Arms - Soul Music - Interesting Times - Maskerade - Feet of Clay - Hogfather - Raising Steam - A Blink of the Screen - Sky1 Adaptations- Dodger - The Long Earth (w Stephen Baxter)

"Interestingly enough, the gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they think they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is important to shoot missionaries on sight."

After eight consecutive full-length novels turned Terry Pratchett into one of the UK's biggest-selling authors and established his fictional flat planet as a melting pot of crazy satirical ideas where anything could happen, the author took a quick break from his normal workload to create a much smaller piece that also happened to be the craziest adventure of them all. Eric returned to examine the fate of the completely non-magical wizard Rincewind, who was last left trapped in a suspiciously familiar demon-filled fiery dungeon dimension. Thankfully, or perhaps not, Rincewind is saved from the lakes of fire through the unintentional efforts of amateur demon-summoner Eric Thursby, thirteen-years-old.

Eric wants only as few meager things that a magical demon should be able to offer; power to rule the world, to meet the most beautiful woman who ever existed, and to live forever. Rincewind explains that he isn't a demon, and therefore can't perform these tricks by clicking his fingers, then, to his ultimate surprise, does so. The result of this is a breath-taking adventure through both time and space, as Rincewind and Eric find themselves flung around the space-time continuum, eventually leading to a meeting with the creator of all life. The plot, as you may have guessed, is a direct satire of Christopher Marlow's Dr. Faustus, or Johann Goethe's Faust, and offers the same sort of moral implications, as Rincewind takes up the role of a rather-more irritated Mephistopheles.

Such is the nature of the novel that the plot is so simple and so-well known that it's not really the point; it reads like an excuse for Pratchett to let loose, to fling his characters into a few different set-pieces that require such a fantastical plot to reach, so that he as the narrator can have some fun exploring and satirizing with familiar twisted logic some ideas that he might otherwise not be able to find an excuse to reach, like The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic or Sourcery on acid. Furthermore, the original, full version of Eric stands out from all  but one other more recent Discworld book (The Last Hero) in that it's an over-sized hardback complete with full single-page and splash-page illustrations from Josh Kirby.

Kirby, who passed away in 2001, had provided the lavishly-detailed cover for each Discworld book prior as well as hundreds of other covers for books and magazines, and film posters. While Eric is available in the regular, non-illustrated format, a reader would be doing themselves a dis-service by skipping over the full version. Without the artwork, Eric is a crazy back-and-forth novella full of fan-service; a slim, poor effort compared to Pratchett's full length work, but Kirby's input changes the project into something a lot more lavish that's much more tempting to look at again