SOURCE: Feeley, Gregory. “Terry Pratchett.” Washington Post Book World 24 (27 March 1994): 11.

In the following review of several Discworld books, Feeley laments the longer novels asserting that the stronger works are those where Pratchett practices brevity.

Terry Pratchett's Small Gods tells of torture, religious repression, death, and the persistence of folly in human affairs. It is an unusual set of themes to come from a writer famous for his delirious comedy, but Pratchett—whatever his reputation as a hip writer of frequently side-splitting humor—has always been a humorist of the most mordant, darkest shade.

His earlier novels, nearly all of which feature death and mayhem in various comic ways, include Reaper Man and Mort, while a third begins by promising to answer the question of what our ancestors would be thinking if they were alive today. (The answer proves to be: “Why is it so dark in here?”) Like...