Bloody Books Reviews - The Young Horrors Season - Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett

I didn't mean to start another themed collection of reviews, but it felt like now was a good time to cast an eye on some of the best YA fiction with a strong fantasy / horror flavour by authors with a lot of passion. This is a series I've often wondered about starting, and whilst not Warhammer, it's all in the collective wheelhouse of genre that fits the Fluffenhammer ethos.

We continue with a trip to space via the inner cities.

We all knew that eventually I'd get a Pratchett review in here. Whilst not a horror/fantasy book as such, it's close enough, and has a scene of real life horror that has lived in my brain since 1994.

We are introduced to one Johnny Maxwell, schoolboy living a life of self-cooked microwavable dinners whilst his parents head towards a relationship breakdown. The impending divorce appears to take up all of their lives and Johnny's wants and needs are left behind during what he calls "The Trying Times". Thankfully, Johnny finds respite with conversations with his friends, and gets a steady supply of pirated computer games from his closet friend, Wobbler. The latest of these is "Only You Can Save Mankind".

Unfortunately, this being a Sir Tezza novel, things will not go as expected. The aliens, the brilliantly named ScreeWee, refuse to be the bad guys in the game, and instead attempt diplomacy. Suddenly, before Johnny knows what to do, the evil reptilian aliens have surrendered to him. Johnny has a new responsibility to protect these aliens as they attempt to flee to their home world. Pratchett plays with the idea of computer games and the world they set out in the time period. Remember, this is when Pentium 1 was the new kid on the block, and Doom was the most sought after purchase. So ideas and concepts like the ScreeWee only have one life and don't come back, unlike the Players. The Captain of the ScreeWee fleet cannot bury another body, and this weariness has caused her to try another path.

Along the journey we enter the game when Johnny sleeps, meeting a secondary player, fights off other gamers and has to deal with rebel ScreeWee who disagree with the surrender. When Johnny dies, he wakes up, back in the real world.

The real world is of course, where the horror lies. The isolation of Johnny's life, against the backdrop of the first Gulf War being constantly televised creates a backdrop that hits home more and more as the years since the book's release tick by. The subject of war is discussed and re-contextualized by the minds of the young boys in Johnny's group, leading to conversations that leap off the page. There's a great deal of sensitivity in the handling of these moments, juxtaposed by the action and adventure of the ScreeWee chapters. A word of warning, about a third through comes a scene of very real violence and loss unlike anything I've come across in any other book of this type. It's stupid and avoidable but the ramifications ring throughout the rest of the pages. Pratchett adds two more entries to this series and hits his stride with Maurice And His Educated Rodents, and the Tiffany Aching series which are genuinely much better, as Only... can veer towards the "preachy" at times. It's a small complaint in what is a fantastic YA / Children's book, but an important one to mention. A larger problem is that the "why" is never explained. It may well be it isn't, and it's all in his head, but the introduction of Kristi (Call me....Sigourney" puts that theory to bed.

Saying all that though, this is a sharp, funny book with oodles of characterisation. Pratchett on a bad day is often heads and tails above everyone else, and that biting social commentary, barely contained rage and satirical sense of humour is all here.

Maybe I'll get to Nation in this series. If I feel ready to revisit it.