Reviews with content warning for Death - The Illustrated Eric

Rincewind is the best-worst wizard ever. Things always go wrong but right themselves. Constantly runs from Death. When he’s summoned by Eric, a teenage demonologies, he sets out on an adventure to grant three wishes while being pursed by the top demon of Hell.

I always admire the wit and humor woven into Discworld books. They are part of series but can he read as stand alone books without much issue. I’m glad I rediscovered these. I read a lot of them when I was younger so now I’m methodically reading them by “series.”

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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adventurous lighthearted fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No

4.0

Eric was incredibly short. Fourteen-year-old demonologist Eric attempts to summon a demon, and instead summons Rincewind, whose ineptitude is basically a skill in and of itself. He makes three wishes, and he and Rincewind get magicked around seeing the consequences of those wishes. There’s also an antagonist in a demon king who wanted Eric to summon a real demon and not an inept wizard, but the story is too short for him to really do anything.

This book being so short (3.5 hours in audiobook, around 150 pages in print) is both good and bad. Good because Eric is an entitled obnoxious brat and I didn’t want to spend any more time with him than I had to. Bad because Rincewind and his ineptitude and cowardice were fun as always and I really wanted more of the demon society and the demon king and his attempts to modernize hell. Those were honestly the most interesting bits and I wished there were more about them.

Aside from Eric himself, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. It’s got Discworld mythology, interesting cultures, bouncing around through space and time, some fun stuff about demons and the Discworld’s version of hell (which I really hope is in future books), a brief and unexplored theme of ancestry and whether you should tell if you know the future, and Rincewind may not be a very deep character but he’s very entertaining. The next Rincewind book is Interesting Times, and I’m looking forward to it.

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tangleroot_eli's review against another edition

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3.0

Reread 2024: Does anyone know when we get to the point in Discworld where Pratchett stopped writing condescendingly about fictional civilizations that are thinly disguised versions of countries England colonized? I'm really looking forward to that.

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I struggle at assigning stars to Discworld novels. Measured against the general run of books I've read, they all rank high. Measured against other Discworld books, some don't entirely hit the mark.

So it is with Eric. I read it in a weekend and enjoyed it a lot. As always, there were plenty of laugh-out-loud moments and sly humor. But it lacks the depth of other Discwold offerings and feels generally more thrown-together. If it were any other book, I might've given it four stars, but compared to the rest of the Pratchett I've read, it's a three.

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