Dragons at Crumbling Castle

Dragons at Crumbling Castle, a collection of stores by a teenaged Terry Pratchett, is the kind of book that gives aspiring writers hope.

As Pratchett himself writes in the book’s dedication, young Pratchett is a writer in larval stage. “To my younger self, who thought these stories were pretty good,” Pratchett writes “Oh, I could teach that lad a thing or two.”

In these stories lies Pratchett’s inventiveness with names, his skill at seeing things from just that slightly different angle, and the beginnings of the satirist we love. And yet for the aspiring writer, here’s proof that not everything a writer writes – and gets published – is gold.

Doubtless all writers dream that someday they’ll be so successful historians and other curious creatures will poke through the rubble of their earliest writings to find the gem of the genius. There’s plenty of that to be found in this collection. But there’s also enough cringe in the writing to say, yeah, Ray Bradbury is right in saying a writer has to write a lot to get the bad stuff out before the good can make it to the page. Paraphrasing of course.

I’m not sure I’d recommend Dragons at Crumbling Castle as an introduction to Pratchett, as the stories are so much different than his Discworld novels. A young reader going from Dragons to Discworld might be better served with the Tiffany Aching series as an intermediate buffer.

Also of note: Almost every review I read of this book comments on the illustrations by Quentin Blake. Nope. These drawings are the work of Mark Beech, who is blessed/cursed to draw in a style imitative of Blake’s. But it’s not Blake.