Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett: Elves, Folklore, and the Witches at Their Most Unsettling

After Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett, this feels like the Witches books coming home and finding something old, malicious, and far too interested in being invited in. Terry Pratchett takes the familiar Lancre setup, adds Morris dancers, standing stones, royal nerves, and a dose of Shakespeare by way of nightmare folklore, then pushes the series into darker territory than its comic surface first suggests.

What makes Lords and Ladies interesting, especially having read the whole Witches run, is that it is much less cosy than people sometimes remember. Discworld has always had teeth, but here Pratchett sharpens them on old ideas about elves and glamour. These are not cute fairy tale creatures, and they are certainly not whimsical woodland sprites. They are beautiful in the way a trap can be beautiful, all seduction, cruelty, and the certainty that everyone else exists for their amusement. Pratchett has enormous fun with that contrast between what stories tell us should be enchanting and what would actually be horrifying if it turned up in your field one summer evening.

The witches themselves are still the reason to show up. Granny Weatherwax is in formidable form, a character who can dominate a room, a kingdom, or probably a weather system through sheer moral pressure. Nanny Ogg remains one of Pratchett’s great secret weapons, because all the vulgarity and sociability sit on top of a genuinely sharp understanding of people. Magrat gets some of the most important work in the book, and rightly so. One of the pleasures of this stretch of Discworld is watching Pratchett stop treating her as just the wet one and start letting her awkwardness, frustration, and stubbornness amount to something.

There is also a lot going on underneath the jokes. Lords and Ladies is obviously riffing on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, folklore, and English rural pageantry, but it is also interested in performance, adulthood, and the stories communities tell about themselves so they do not have to think too hard. Lancre has always been one of Discworld’s most elastic settings, able to hold farce, politics, myth, and peasant common sense at the same time. This book uses that flexibility well. It can jump from daft comedy to something genuinely eerie without feeling like it has changed novels halfway through.

That said, three stars feels fair. Compared with Wyrd Sisters at five and Witches Abroad at four, this one never quite settles into the same rhythm for me. Parts of it are terrific, especially whenever Pratchett leans into the menace of the elves or the internal dynamics of the coven, but the whole thing can feel a bit crowded. There are stretches where the novel is juggling so many threads, ideas, and comic diversions that the forward pull weakens a touch. The book is never dull, Pratchett is too nimble for that, but it does occasionally feel like a very good Discworld novel circling an even better one.

I also think this is one of the Witches books where your mileage will depend on how much you enjoy the wider texture versus the central drive. If you are here for atmosphere, folklore, and the three leads bouncing off one another, there is loads to like. If you want the cleanest structure or the hardest emotional punch, later books in this branch do it better. Having already read on to Maskerade and Carpe Jugulum, I do not think Lords and Ladies is the peak of the Witches sequence, but it is an important bridge between the earlier, broader comic entries and the richer, more confident novels that follow.

Even with that reservation, it is still very easy to recommend. If you like fantasy that understands old myths well enough to make them funny and frightening in the same breath, this is very much your sort of thing. If Susanna Clarke, Diana Wynne Jones, or the more folkloric corners of Neil Gaiman work for you, there is a similar pleasure here in seeing ancient ideas dragged into the light and made answer for themselves. Pratchett never forgets to entertain, but he is far too sharp to leave folklore as just decorative wallpaper.

Lords and Ladies is not one of my absolute favourite Discworld books, and it is not even my favourite Witches novel, but it is still packed with wit, atmosphere, and the kind of prickly intelligence Terry Pratchett made look effortless. When it is funny, it is very funny. When it turns sinister, it does so with a proper chill behind the smile. That mix alone makes it worth the trip back to Lancre.

Rating: 3/5

The Audible UK edition is narrated by Indira Varma, Peter Serafinowicz, and Bill Nighy and runs to 10 hrs and 12 mins.