3 hours and 58 minutes
English language
Published July 7, 2022 by Penguin Audio.
Eric is the Discworld’s only demonology hacker. Pity he’s not very good at it.
All he wants is his three wishes granted. Nothing fancy - to be immortal, rule the world, have the most beautiful woman in the world fall madly in love with him, the usual stuff.
But instead of a tractable demon, he calls up Rincewind, probably the most incompetent wizard in the universe, and the extremely intractable and hostile form of travel accessory known as the Luggage.
With them on his side, Eric’s in for a ride through space and time that is bound to make him wish (quite fervently) again - this time that he’d never been born.
Short and sweet. This one seemed to cut a lot of the fluff, while remaining, as a whole, fluff.
Wherein: Eric learns to be careful what you wish for and to read the fine print of the wishing rules. Rincewind appears to possibly have -some- magic skills and definitely has great "run away" skills. The Luggage continues to be a strong candidate for my favorite Discworld character (it's a tight race with the Librarian).
Content warning Mild Spoilers
While still a Discworld novel and still an enjoyable read, Eric has never been one of my favorites. It does, however, have one or two excellent points to make about the world and its people and how what we wish for isn't always what we'll get.
Well done, couldn't stand much of it for some reason. Definitely see why people like it though.
Rincewind and the luggage are my two favourite characters, the last book of Terry's I read was Pyramids and I gotta admit it is great to get back on track with these wonderful books.
Some brilliant comedy from Terry here and a nice collection of characters. The demons had me laughing, all their bureaucracy and rubber plants had me laughing. Rincewind also got to travel around in time witnessing some historic moments a siege of a famous city featuring a wooden horse, the creator eating his lunch just before the creation of the disk.
One issue I had which stopped it getting 5 stars was the ending, I felt there could be more with Eric and Rincewind. Things just sort of suddenly ended.
Still, that is book 9 ticked off the list....next!
Lightning quick - couldn't have been more than 150 pages printed, but very concentrated comedy. Almost feels like an interlude between more developed stories.
If "Eric" were a food, it'd be a hot dog. It feels like Pratchett took random bits of humor that weren't good enough to make it in other books, and mushed them all together. Eric is the lips and assholes of Pratchett's storytelling.
Eric seems to exist soley to resolve the cliffhanger ending of Sourcery, and it does so with a moderately amusing Deus Ex Machina. The rest of the book is more like a Family Guy episode than a coherent novel.
