Mass Market Paperback, 197 pages
English language
Published Feb. 4, 2002 by HarperTorch.
Discworld's only demonology hacker, Eric, is about to make life very difficult for the rest of Ankh-Morpork's denizens. This would-be Faust is very bad...at his work, that is. All he wants is to fulfill three little wishes: to live forever, to be master of the universe, and to have a stylin' hot babe.
But Eric isn't even good at getting his own way. Instead of a powerful demon, he conjures, well, Rincewind, a wizard whose incompetence is matched only by Eric's. And as if that wasn't bad enough, that lovable travel accessory the Luggage has arrived, too. Accompanied by his best friends, there's only one thing Eric wishes now—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.
