I’d never read a Sir Terry Pratchett book before A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories. Internet scuttlebutt is that he was a very nice man. ‘Was’ because I’ve gone about it backwards, reading his posthumously published collection of short stories first. When he passed away, he asked that a steamroller run over his computer hard drive so that none of his unfinished or unworthy work would be published. This wish was fulfilled, but what he didn’t account for were sleuths tracking these previously unknown stories down.
No one knew these stories existed because Mr. Pratchett used an alias back when using an alias was an effective way of keeping your anonymity. He had published them in a newspaper back when newspapers were a viable place to publish things like serialized stories. ‘Back when’ being the 70s and 80s.
Perhaps he would have been tickled by my starting at the end, which was really his beginning.
I say that because it’s a silly book filled with what I’ve heard people call ‘British humour’. More than a few of the stories take place in the town of Blackbury. The town is troubled by a maniac with a weather rifle, haunted by a steamroller, and turned into a jungle by magic seeds.
I enjoyed the book.
Other stories include a man who holidays every second Tuesday in the Jurassic, garden gnomes who take advantage of their hosts, and a wizard named Grubble the Utterly Untrustworthy who seeks the Most Valuable Thing in the Universe.
You get the idea.
Some of the stories even stuck with me for days later, giving me the uncomfortable feeling that I had somehow learned something, but I didn’t mind too much. In fact, I’m looking forward to reading one of the over one hundred works he published while alive.
– Mike
