Even Discworld Has an Off Day

⭐⭐⭐

Snuff is, unfortunately, my lowest-rated Discworld book so far.

Giving a Discworld novel three stars feels strangely harsh because even a weaker Terry Pratchett book still has plenty going for it. There are funny moments, some great observations, familiar characters I love spending time with, and flashes of that Pratchett brilliance that makes Discworld such a special series. But Snuff just didn’t come together for me in the way these books normally do.

The biggest problem I had was that it feels all over the place.

One of the things I’ve always loved about Discworld is just how tightly put together the books are. They can seem chaotic on the surface, with multiple characters, subplots and seemingly random little diversions happening at once, but usually there’s a purpose behind all of it. Pratchett somehow manages to juggle everything and then, towards the end, all those separate threads start coming together. Something that seemed like a throwaway joke 150 pages earlier suddenly becomes important. A character who seemed to be wandering around doing their own thing turns out to be part of the bigger picture. There’s usually this wonderful sense of everything clicking into place.

I never really got that feeling with Snuff.

Instead, it felt like the book kept wandering off in different directions and occasionally forgot where it had been going in the first place. The pacing didn’t have that usual Discworld tightness to it. There are sections that drag, sections that seem to rush through things that probably deserved more attention, and other bits that feel as though they’ve been dropped into the story without ever being properly connected to everything around them.

The Sergeant Colon side story is probably the best example.

There’s this whole separate thing happening with Colon back in Ankh-Morpork, and while I was reading it I naturally assumed it was building towards something. It’s Discworld, after all. You expect the seemingly unrelated subplot to eventually connect to the main story in some clever or funny way.

Except it doesn’t really. It just sort of… ends.

After spending time periodically checking back in with Colon, the entire thing is wrapped up in what feels like about a page, with little to no fanfare. I genuinely had a moment of, “Oh. Is that it?” It felt bizarrely anticlimactic, especially because the book had spent enough time on the storyline that I assumed there was going to be some kind of payoff. Instead, it almost feels as though Pratchett suddenly remembered that the subplot needed an ending and quickly tied it off before moving on.

There were also several sections of Snuff where I genuinely couldn’t work out what was happening.

That’s not something I can remember struggling with much in previous Discworld books. Pratchett’s writing can obviously be playful, and he’ll sometimes deliberately dance around an idea rather than spelling it out, but here I found myself rereading whole paragraphs and occasionally entire pages because I thought I’d missed something.

I’d go back. Read it again. Still not quite get it. Read it for a third time. And sometimes I’d eventually figure out what was happening, but there were other occasions where I just gave up and carried on.

It wasn’t that the ideas themselves were particularly complicated either. It was more that some scenes seemed to jump between thoughts, characters or events in a way that made them difficult to follow. There were moments where I honestly wondered whether I’d accidentally skipped a page. Then I’d check the page numbers, realise I hadn’t, go back and reread the previous section and still be sitting there thinking, “Right… so what exactly just happened?”

That made the book surprisingly tiring to read in places.

Which is a shame, because there’s still a lot here that I like.

Vimes is Vimes, and I could happily read about him being irritated by the world for hundreds of pages. Putting him somewhere outside his usual environment is a fun idea, especially because Vimes is so closely tied to Ankh-Morpork. Seeing him supposedly going on holiday while being completely incapable of switching off the copper part of his brain is exactly the kind of setup that should work brilliantly.

And there are moments where it absolutely does.

The book also has some interesting things to say about prejudice, exploitation, class, justice and the way societies decide who deserves to be treated as a person. That’s familiar territory for Discworld, but it’s territory Pratchett was always very good at exploring. He could take something incredibly serious, filter it through trolls, dwarfs, goblins or whatever else happened to be wandering around Discworld, make you laugh about it and then suddenly hit you with an observation that was painfully human.

There are glimpses of that throughout Snuff.

But the story surrounding those ideas just never felt as strong as I wanted it to.

There’s almost too much going on while, strangely, it also sometimes feels as though not enough is happening. Threads are introduced, abandoned for long stretches, picked up again and then resolved incredibly quickly. Some scenes feel important but don’t seem to lead anywhere. Others rush past things that seem as though they should have been major moments.

It lacks that sense of control I’ve come to expect from Discworld.

And maybe that’s why the problems stood out so much. If this were a random fantasy novel I’d picked up, perhaps I wouldn’t have been quite as bothered by some of it. But after reading so many Discworld books and seeing just how effortlessly Pratchett could make incredibly complicated stories feel simple, Snuff feels unusually messy.

There is still plenty of Pratchett here. There are still jokes that made me laugh. There are still lines that made me stop and appreciate how good he was at seeing the absurdity in people. There are still characters I love, and I’m glad I read it.

I didn’t hate Snuff. Not even close.

But I did find it frustrating.

More than anything, it feels like a Discworld book where all the individual ingredients are there but they haven’t quite been assembled properly. The humour is there. Vimes is there. The social commentary is there. The strange characters and ridiculous situations are there. But that incredibly precise machinery underneath everything — the thing that normally makes a Discworld novel suddenly snap together — didn’t seem to be working in quite the same way.

Three stars isn’t a terrible rating, and there was enough here that I enjoyed to stop me going lower. But in the context of Discworld, it’s easily the most disappointing one I’ve read so far.

My lowest-rated Discworld book.

I genuinely never thought I’d be giving one three stars.