Carpe Jugulum

Carpe Jugulum (1998) Terry Pratchett

I’m not quite sure what it is, but I found this book disappointing. Don’t get me wrong, there were places where I laughed out loud–it just seemed like those places were farther apart than usual.

There were lots of tables [in Nanny Ogg’s house], mainly in order to display the vast number of drawings and iconographs of the huge Ogg clan. At first sight these looked randomly placed, until you worked out the code. In reality, pictures were advanced or retarded around the room as various family members fell in and out of favor, and anyone ending up on the small, wobbly table near the cat’s bowl had some serious spadework to do. What made it worse was that you could fall down in the pecking order not because you’d done something wrong, but because everyone else had done something better.

Part of me thinks that this would be a very good book if it were about a hundred pages shorter. I kept speeding along looking for the bits with Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, almost skimming through other parts of the story.

I do have to admit that I did like the priest of Om, which surprised me, since Small Gods was not one of my favorite Discworld books.

For some reason part of the book feels like he was trying to cash in on the Buffy craze, than mock it. And since the witches of Lancre and (incidentally) dealt with a vampire before, it did make sense let Lancre and the witches be the ones to deal with the vampires.

All in all, this is not one of my favorite Discworld books. The secondary characters–the vampires–seemed rather flat and uninteresting, and I found the bit with the Wee Free Men unnecessary, and perhaps even uninteresting. That may be due to the fact that I have not yet read Wee Free Men, but even so, one of the things I’ve always liked best about Terry Pratchett is that his books can stand on their own, although they’re better if you know the back-story.

But, there were some very good bits with Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax, so the book is worth reading for that.

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