The Last Hero: Funny and deep

The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett

Note: Terry Pratchett’s The Last Hero works without the illustrations, but you don’t want to miss out on Paul Kidby‘s fabulous Discworld art.

The Last Hero follows the trail of several popular Discworld characters and this is the closest you’ll get to a world-spanning crossover. There’s no real villain in the story — simply lots of good guys working on opposite ends.

As typical of a Discworld novel, Pratchett pokes fun at the convention of fantasy and what makes a hero a hero. Comedy aside though, the book contains depth and, at the end of all this, the one thing I can promise you is that at least one character comes out of it more mature.

Terry Pratchett shows us that comedy and fun doesn’t mean that a story can’t be meaningful or deep.

FanLit thanks Charles Tan from Bibliophile Stalker for contributing this guest review.

Discworld — (1983-2015) Discworld is a satirical fantasy world created by Terry Pratchett to poke fun at 1980s fantasy novels. Since then, they’ve evolved so that they now make fun of everything. Mr. Pratchett explains Discworld: “The world rides through space on the back of a turtle. This is one of the great ancient world myths, found wherever men and turtles are gathered together; the four elephants were an indo-European sophistication. The idea has been lying in the lumber room of legend for centuries. All I had to do was grab it and run away before the alarms went off… There are no maps. You can’t map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs.” The Discworld novels are presented here in publication order. To read more about the Discworld “arcs” and reading order, see this Wikipedia article.