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Carpe Jugulum (Discworld, #23; Witches, #6)

Terry Pratchett

Start date: September 1, 2020

Finish date: September 30, 2020

Discussion: 2025

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2025

The Light Fantastic | October
By Annemieke / A… , The Great A'Tuin · 3 posts · 9 views

last updated Oct 05, 2025 11:23AM

Maskerade | July
By Annemieke / A… , The Great A'Tuin · 14 posts · 7 views

last updated Sep 16, 2025 06:29PM

What Members Thought

Apr 15, 2025 David rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2025, fantasy, discworld

The Witches have grown to be my favorite corner of Discworld which made Carpe Jugulum a little bit of a bittersweet read as this is the last book to feature them. I know Granny is around in a supporting role in the Tiffany Aching books and some of the other characters have a few cameos later on down the road, but for the most part this is it. As send offs go this is mostly pretty good. The jokes all land, the vampires are fun villains, and the scenes focusing on Granny and Oats are some of my fa The Witches have grown to be my favorite corner of Discworld which made Carpe Jugulum a little bit of a bittersweet read as this is the last book to feature them. I know Granny is around in a supporting role in the Tiffany Aching books and some of the other characters have a few cameos later on down the road, but for the most part this is it. As send offs go this is mostly pretty good. The jokes all land, the vampires are fun villains, and the scenes focusing on Granny and Oats are some of my favorite bits of Pratchett’s writing.

This book is a big improvement for the character of Agnes as well. The biggest issue I had with Maskerade was the constant fat jokes. People defend that stuff by saying these jokes are all either examples of the way Agnes talks about herself or are insults from other characters, and not an example of the author just having a go at a fat person. This is a tricky balance to strike and I don’t think he managed it in Maskerade. An awful lot of those jokes are coming straight from the narrator in that one, and the way that Pratchett writes it’s hard not to see the narrator as just a mouthpiece for the author’s point of view. On the other hand Pratchett manages to thread the needle with that stuff here, and the book is far better for it.

There’s a couple things that keep this from being a five star book for me. The book’s inciting incident (the king of Lancre inviting a family of vampires in to his kingdom) requires a whole lot of people to act pretty dumb, even by Discworld standards. This is especially tough to buy since Pratchett goes to great lengths to show us that Discworld is a place where literally everyone is aware of the rules that vampires live by.

Likewise Granny Weatherwax is absent for almost half of the book. I get why Terry probably thought that was necessary: at this point he was basically writing the character like she’s an irresistible force of nature. You get the feeling that if she’d been around at the start of the book she’d have had the whole thing wrapped up in under fifty pages. However the specific reason given for her absence was a real eye roll for me.

Great fun overall, even with my admittedly minor complaints. I’ll definitely be missing the witches of Lancre going forward. ...more

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Apr 21, 2025 Sarah Thomas rated it it was amazing

Will come back to write a proper review. But reviews on works by Sir Terry Pratchett take time - his writing is always far too multi-faceted for a quick review to do justice or any kind.

BUT

If you want to read about the power of women, belief, the questioning of religion, and so much else, give this book a read.

Sir Terry’s books always have at least one moral to the story (I think this one has many!!) but the basic, most obvious to me, is that a monster is still a monster no matter what it may a ...more

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