#Review - A Stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett

A Stroke of the Pen (The Lost Stories)
Terry Pratchett
Doubleday, 10 October 2023
Available as: HB, 220pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780857529633

I'm grateful to Milly at Doubleday for sending me an advance copy of A Stroke of the Pen to consider for review. I've been so eager to share this review, but barred by solemn and strict prohibitions form doing so before now.

As you can imagine I was delighted to see these stories had been discovered - the background to that, set out here, is truly intriguing: nobody knew about most of them as they were written and published, under different names, in newspapers before Sir Terry was widely known. The stories only came to light when Pat and Jan Harkin were asked to track down a potential serial, The Quest for the Keys, which is also given in full here. As well as finding all of Quest, Pat and Jan located another 18 stories besides.

The resulting collection is a glorious, if bittersweet, read - surely this must be the last posthumous Pratchett collection, even if one or two more pieces may emerge? Being home alone for an evening, I sat down and read them all without pause, savouring not just the Pratchettness of them all but also the overall effect of the collection. Yes, there is the occasional foreshadowing of something Sir Terry would return to later. As a child of the 70s, though, I also spotted a certain taste of that decade, for example the thinly disguised celebrities referenced in "How Scrooge Saw the Spectral Light..." or the industrial relations problems described in "The New Father Christmas".

If you can sense a theme here, yes, given their origin in newspapers, it's perhaps not surprising that a number of these stories have a Christmas theme, affectionately playing with the absurdities of the season. I did think that at the back of them one might see the ghost of Hogfather or perhaps even of Death, as an anthropomorphic projection finds itself needled out of its accustomed role. Maybe. I wouldn't insist on it - though I'd also point at "Mr Brown's Holiday Accident" which plays games with the nature of reality - creating a well developed and twisty example of SF as well as a very funny story.

Being funny is not unusual in this collection. While Neil Gaiman writes in the Introduction that Pratchett here "is not a humorist, not yet" there is certainly a sense of fun here, a willingness to send things up, with "The Quest for the Key", the longest and most developed story, already taking on the satirising of fantasy that later developed in Discworld. There is also a bit of a shared world going on, with the town of Blackburn recurring as a location for the bizarre. Not everything takes place there, though, these stories are varied, from a parody of a Gold Rush Western ("The Real Wild West") to a sort of Close Encounters spin-off ("The Blackberry Thing") to time-travel, dragons and ghosts.

Overall, the impression is of a writer whose mind is seething with ideas, busily selecting from them to fill the (scanty) room allowed for a newspaper story, salting them with puns and allusions, hinting at a complex world behind the whole, and having a great deal of fun in the process.

Much, in fact, like the later writer, apart, perhaps, from that need to get the whole thing down in 500 words...

In short, read this, it'll make you happy. (It might also make a good Christmas present...)

For more information about A Stroke of the Pen, see the publisher's website here.