I came to this one late, which I understand is a common way into Discworld, people jumping in wherever a friend or a librarian happens to point them rather than starting at book one. Small Gods stands alone well enough that this worked fine. The premise is that gods on the Discworld run on belief the way an engine runs on fuel, and the Great God Om has run desperately low, reduced from a towering presence to a one-eyed tortoise who can only find one genuine believer in his entire church, a dim, kind, extraordinarily literal novice named Brutha.

What got me is how precisely Pratchett aims the satire without ever losing the character work underneath it. The church of Om has become a machine built to perpetuate itself rather than the god it claims to serve, complete with an inquisition and elaborate torture instruments that everyone’s stopped questioning because questioning things is exactly what gets you tortured. That’s sharp stuff, and it stays sharp for the whole book, but it never turns into a lecture because Brutha himself is so specifically drawn, a man whose photographic memory and total lack of guile make him useless for the church’s actual business and perfect for the god’s. There’s a genuinely moving turn in the desert crossing that I did not expect a comic fantasy novel to pull off, and it works because the jokes never stopped being jokes right up until they weren’t.

I’ll admit the philosopher subplot, the ongoing argument among the sages back in the city, dragged for me a little in the middle, more setup than payoff for a while. But the ending brings everything back together in a way that made we want to reread the first chapters immediately to see what I’d missed. Five stars, no hesitation. This is the kind of book that convinces you a genuinely funny writer can also be doing serious work at the same time, not despite the jokes but through them.