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    Johnny and the Dead
    Johnny and the Dead
    Johnny and the Dead
    Ebook187 pages2 hours

    Johnny and the Dead

    By Terry Pratchett

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Sir Terry Pratchett, beloved and bestselling author of the Discworld fantasy series, explores the bonds between the living and the dead and proves that it's never too late to have the time of your life—even if it is your afterlife!

    Johnny Maxwell's new friends do not appreciate the term "ghosts," but they are, well, dead.

    The town council wants to sell the cemetery, and its inhabitants aren't about to take that lying down! Johnny is the only one who can see them, and and the previously alive need his help to save their home and their history. Johnny didn't mean to become the voice for the lifeless, but if he doesn't speak up, who will?

    Read more of Johnny Maxwell's adventures in Only You Can Save Mankind and Johnny and the Bomb!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061975219
    Johnny and the Dead
    Author

    Terry Pratchett

    Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) was the acclaimed creator of the globally revered Discworld series. In all, he authored more than fifty bestselling books, which have sold more than one hundred million copies worldwide. His novels have been widely adapted for stage and screen, and he was the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal. He was awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to literature in 2009, although he always wryly maintained that his greatest service to literature was to avoid writing any.

    Read more from Terry Pratchett

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    Reviews for Johnny and the Dead

    3.5/5

    345 ratings18 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Extremely funny time travel tale, aimed at the younger reader. Also gives readers an idea of what it was like to be in England during the second world war.
    • 4/5
      I've read this before (and seen the TV series they made of it) but really needed a distraction for some boring data-editing work and this was great to have on in the background as an audio book, engaging the parts of my brain that would otherwise have been stagnating.

      I think Pratchett does a good job of capturing the huge gulf between everyday life in 1941 and 1996 - and it's intriguing that aspects of life in 1996 are already striking me as quaintly old fashioned (phones that are confined to one room, for example, no-one carrying mobile phones).
    • 3/5
      I think this book was my favourite of the trilogy. I think Pratchett did a good job of laughing at teenagers and wartime Britain.
    • 4/5
      After a bit of a shaky start this turns into rather a good little novel with some great scenes. It's best to read them in the order Pratchett has arranged them in.
    • 4/5
      Accidentally read out of order, thought this was second book of three but it's actually the third.Didn't feel like I was missing out on anything by missing second book, except Johnny's parents are suddenly separated.Lots of very funny bits as well as references to the Discworld books.A quick read which took longer because of my having to travel to my cousin's wedding. Got through the last half very quickly.
    • 5/5
      Johnny and the Bomb. So very clever, so very accurate, so very casual, a daft, funny time-travelling young adult yarn.. .. .. .. and yet .. .. Nobody is who they think they are, or where they think they are. Brilliant stuff.
    • 3/5
      Clever.
      -------------
      Read it back when I working really hard to appreciate the love my friends have for Pratchett, don't remember it now.
    • 3/5
      This is not the broad comedy that many Pratchett fans expect. It's more serious, and intriguing. A young adult novel, quite competent.
    • 4/5
      Amazingly, this book took eleven years from its UK publication to be published in the US, appearing here in 2007. The version I read was the US one, whose Americanization has its dumber moments: I did at least a triple take when there was mention of the High Street being littered with, among other typical items, empty "chip packets". Just to add to the conceptual confusion, later in the book at least one discarded packet of fish and chips played a minor role; I had to be grateful for the small mercy that this didn't become "fish and fries".

      Such quirks -- and they're few -- don't really detract from the enjoyability of the book, which is considerable. Young Johnny Maxwell and his pals Wobbler, Yo-less, Bigmac and Kirsty, know old Mrs Tachyon as one of Blackbury's characters: babbling battily and pushing her decrepit supermarket trolley around town, her vicious cat Guilty aboard it among the numerous mysterious black plastic bags, the bag lady is hard to miss. When she's involved in an accident and has to be rushed to hospital, Johnny takes cart, bags and cat home for safekeeping in the family garage. Inadvertently manipulating one of the bags, he undergoes what one might call a spontaneous time-travel experience. It seems that what Mrs Tachyon has been storing in her bags is time. A little later, in a more controlled experiment, Johnny takes his chums with him, and they find they're in Blackbury as it was in 1941; moreover, Johnny realizes that it's not just any day in 1941 but the day leading up to the night he's just been reading about for his school history project, the night when a German bombing mission, off course, dropped its load on Blackbury's Paradise Street, causing huge damage and the loss of many lives.

      Kirsty is the brains of the group; she's also widely regarded as insufferable, because of her intelligence, her pronounced feminism, and her pushiness . . . so I loved the character most of any in the book She has numerous good lines, but none (in my opinion) better than the one she comes out with on the pals' arrival in 1941:

      "Oh dear, it's going to be that kind of adventure after all," she hissed, sitting up. "It's just the sort of thing I didn't want to happen. Me, and four token boys. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. It's only a mercy we haven't got a dog." (p83)

      Johnny is keen to avert the night's tragedy; even so, he's aware of the Trousers of Time effect, that if you alter something in the past you can find yourself going down the wrong leg of the Trousers to arrive in a different future from the one you expected. Indeed, exactly this happens during the pals' various adventures when Wobbler, who's got separated from the rest, unwittingly manages to make his own grandfather (who at the time of encounter is Richmal Crompton's William Brown in all but name) a victim of the bombing raid, thereby cancelling out his own existence in a future to which the rest of the kids briefly return. (The section of the book featuring this subtly different alternative future is especially nicely handled.) In the end Johnny realizes the challenge is to get the air raid siren sounded in time that, while Paradise Road and its nearby pickle factory are destroyed, just as the old newspaper he read for his school project told him, the residents are able to get to their shelters. But this isn't as easy as it sounds, because the switch for the siren is in the police station in town, and will not be pulled until the rozzers hear from the lookout post on a distant hill; the storm that has misled the German bombers has blown out the phone from the lookout post, and the backup motorbike there won't start . . .

      Like all the best kids' books, this holds as much to engage adults as most adult novels do, if not more. As noted, Kirsty's a joy; also wonderful among the characters is Yo-less, who's black but also, clashing with ignorant racial stereotypes, the class nerd -- a nerd so nerdish that, as is observed somewhere in the text, if you gave him a baseball cap he'd put it on the right way round. In connection with Yo-less, the book refreshingly confronts casual racism, in both past and present Blackbury, face-on: people do not mean their remarks and attitudes about Yo-less unkindly, not really, but they're fucking offensive all the same. At first Kirsty makes the excuse for them that "it's only the way they've been brought up" and tells Yo-less not to worry; but then, when she encounters some 1940s casual sexism, he tosses the same line back at her and she gets the point. The time-travel aspects of the tale are neatly worked out, as are the potentials for paradox. Much recommended.
    • 5/5
      i lkie it
    • 2/5
      It's Terry Pratchett's doing, so of course it's fun. It plays around with the idea of time travel in a way that doesn't break my brain too much, which I can accept easily enough to drag me along for the ride. I'm told it's not the first book in the series, though, and it shows: I would probably have cared more if, well, I'd already cared.

      I'm not really sure what to say about it. I was quite excited to get a Terry Pratchett book on my course, but now I've got it, I don't think I'm going to write about it. It's clever and sometimes funny, and there's hints at engaging with deeper issues, but most of the time I was a little bored -- probably due to the target audience being quite a bit younger than I am! -- and just reading it because I had to. Which is a bit of a shame because I normally love Terry Pratchett.
    • 4/5
      Pratchet-Johnny and the Bomb-can the guys travel in time and alert the town before the bombs land?
    • 3/5
      I'm not really a huge Pratchett fan, and sadly, I don't think this is one of the gems. I liked the way the time is looked at in the book, especially the idea of how to move through it. Not a classic, but a slightly different way of doing a story with parallel universes. Loved the bag lady.
    • 4/5
      While I don't think the Johnny Maxwell books are as great as Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, I am disappointed that there are only three. With this last one, Johnny and the Bomb, the character of Johnny seems to really take shape and accept his "powers". It would be great to follow him on more adventures where is large imagination is so large, it escapes his head and turns real. As it is, however, the last book in this trilogy treats readers to a thoughtful look about time travel and World War II. Pratchett presents a diverse look about the issues that come up between the time travel and war. He delivers many thoughtful ideas that can ruminate in one's mind for quite a while. Overall, this is a wonderful series of books series of books that are more lesson oriented than the Discworld books, but still very enjoyable and contemplative.
    • 4/5
      This book is the third in Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell trillogy, and while Only You Can Save Mankind is still my favorite, I loved this one too. Like all Pratchett, you'll get lovely layers of humor, a deep sense of humanity, and a fun, tightly woven plot. Recommende for all readers.
    • 5/5
      In my favorite of the Johnny Maxwell trilogy, Johnny crosses paths with Mrs. Tachyon, a bag lady who also is a time traveller. He and his friends travel back to WWII in their town with the predictable changing of time that must be fixed. However, instead of simply changing time back to its previous path, Johnny wants to prevent a bomb wiping out Paradise Street in the middle of the night. This necessitates a lot of maneuvering by the kids with the usual humorous Pratchett twists and turns along the way. I was surprised at what a page turner it became by the end as I stayed up way past bedtime to get Johnny and his pals home again.
    • 4/5
      Pratchett starts off again by taking an off-the-cuff saying literally. What if you really had "bags of time"? What would you do? Where and when would you go? And if you had the chance to change something, would you?
    • 3/5
      Children go back in time and find themselves involved in an adventure set in the 2nd World War. Great characters and a good plot.

    Book preview

    Johnny and the Dead - Terry Pratchett

    CONTENTS

    Author’s Note

    One

    Two

    Three

    Four

    Five

    Six

    Seven

    Eight

    Nine

    Ten

    Eleven

    Back Ads

    About the Author

    Books by Terry Pratchett

    Credits

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    AUTHOR’S NOTE

    I’ve bent history a little bit. There really were such things as Pals’ Battalions, just as described here, and they really were a horribly innocent device for wiping out a whole generation of young men from one particular area with one cannon shell. But the practice died out by the summer of 1916, when the first Battle of the Somme took place. Nineteen thousand British soldiers died on the first day of the battle.

    Thomas Atkins really was the name used on documents in the British Army in the way that people would now use A.N. Other, and Tommy Atkins did become a nickname for the British soldier.

    There were certainly a number of real Tommy Atkinses in the war. This book is dedicated to them—wherever they are.

    ONE

    Johnny never knew for certain why he started seeing the dead.

    The Alderman said it was probably because he was too lazy not to.

    Most people’s minds don’t let them see things that might upset them, he said. The Alderman said he should know if anyone did, because he’d spent his whole life (1822–1906) not seeing things.

    Wobbler Johnson, who was technically Johnny’s best friend, said it was because he was nuts.

    But Yo-less, who read medical books, said it was probably because he couldn’t focus his mind like normal people. Normal people just ignored almost everything that was going on around them, so that they could concentrate on important things like, well, getting up, going to the lavatory, and getting on with their lives. Whereas Johnny just opened his eyes in the morning and the whole universe hit him in the face.

    Wobbler said this sounded like nuts to him.

    Whatever it was called, what it meant was this: Johnny saw things other people didn’t.

    Like the dead people hanging around in the cemetery.

    The Alderman—at least the old Alderman—was a bit snobby about most of the rest of the dead, even about Mr. Vicenti, who had a huge black marble grave with angels and a photograph of Mr. Vicenti (1897–1958) looking not at all dead behind a little window. The Alderman said Mr. Vicenti had been a Capo di Monte in the Mafia. Mr. Vicenti told Johnny that, on the contrary, he had spent his entire life being a wholesale novelty salesman, amateur escapologist, and children’s entertainer, which in a number of important respects was as exactly like not being in the Mafia as it was possible to get.

    But all this was later. After he’d gotten to know the dead a lot better. After the raising of the ghost of the Ford Capri.

    Johnny really discovered the cemetery after he’d started living at Granddad’s. This was Phase Three of Trying Times, after the shouting, which had been bad, and the Being Sensible About Things (which had been worse; people are better at shouting). Now his dad was getting a new job somewhere on the other side of the country. There was a vague feeling that it might all work out, now that people had stopped trying to be sensible. On the whole, he tried not to think about it.

    He’d started using the path along the canal instead of going home on the bus, and had found that if you climbed over the place where the wall had fallen down, and then went around behind the crematorium, you could cut off half the journey.

    The graves went right up to the canal’s edge.

    It was one of those old cemeteries you got owls and foxes in and sometimes, in the Sunday papers, people going on about Our Victorian Heritage, although they didn’t go on about this one because it was the wrong kind of heritage, being too far from London.

    Wobbler said it was spooky and sometimes went home the long way, but Johnny was disappointed that it wasn’t spookier. Once you sort of put out of your mind what it was—once you forgot about all the skeletons underground, grinning away in the dark—it was quite friendly. Birds sang. All the traffic sounded a long way off. It was peaceful.

    He’d had to check a few things, though. Some of the older graves had big stone boxes on top of them, and in the wilder parts these had cracked and even fallen open. He’d had a look inside, just in case.

    It had been sort of disappointing to find nothing there.

    And then there were the mausoleums. These were much bigger and had doors in them, like little houses. They looked a bit like garden sheds with extra angels. The angels were generally more lifelike than you’d expect, especially one near the entrance who looked as though he’d just remembered that he should have gone to the toilet before he left heaven.

    The two boys walked through the cemetery now, kicking up the drifts of fallen leaves.

    It’s Halloween next week, said Wobbler. I’m having a party. You have to come as something horrible. Don’t bother to find a disguise.

    Thanks, said Johnny.

    You notice how there’s a lot more Halloween stuff in the shops these days? said Wobbler.

    It’s because of Bonfire Night, said Johnny. Too many people were blowing themselves up with fireworks, so they invented Halloween, where you just wear masks and stuff.

    Mrs. Nugent says all that sort of thing is tampering with the occult, said Wobbler. Mrs. Nugent was the Johnsons’ next-door neighbor, and known to be unreasonable on subjects like Madonna played at full volume at three A.M.

    Probably it is, said Johnny.

    She says witches are abroad on Halloween, said Wobbler.

    What? Johnny’s forehead wrinkled. Like . . . Marjorca and places?

    Suppose so, said Wobbler.

    Makes . . . sense, I suppose. They probably get special out-of-season bargains, being old ladies, said Johnny. My aunt can go anywhere on the buses for almost nothing, and she’s not even a witch.

    Don’t see why Mrs. Nugent is worried, then, said Wobbler. It ought to be a lot safer around here, with all the witches on vacation.

    They passed a very ornate mausoleum, which even had little stained-glass windows. It was hard to imagine who’d want to see in, but then, it was even harder to imagine who’d want to look out.

    Shouldn’t like to be on the same plane as ’em, said Wobbler, who’d been thinking hard. Just think, p’raps you can only afford to go on vacation in the autumn, and you get on the plane, and there’s all these old witches going abroad.

    Singing ‘Here we go, here we go, here we go’? said Johnny. "But I bet you’d get really good service in the hotel."

    Yeah.

    Funny, really, said Johnny.

    What?

    I saw a thing in a book once, said Johnny, about these people in Mexico or somewhere, where they all go down to the cemetery for a big fiesta at Halloween every year. Like they don’t see why people should be left out of things just because they’re dead.

    Yuck. A picnic? In the actual cemetery?

    Yes.

    Reckon you’d get green glowing hands pushing up through the earth and swiping the sandwiches?

    Don’t think so. Anyway . . . they don’t eat sandwiches in Mexico. They eat tort . . . something.

    Tortoises.

    Yeah?

    I bet, said Wobbler, looking around, I bet . . . I bet you wouldn’t dare knock on one of those doors. I bet you’d hear dead people lurchin’ about inside.

    Why do they lurch?

    Wobbler thought about this.

    They always lurch, he said. Dunno why. I’ve seen them in videos. And they can push their way through walls.

    Why? said Johnny.

    Why what?

    Why push their way through walls? I mean . . . living people can’t do that. Why should dead people do it?

    Wobbler’s mother was very easygoing in the matter of videos. According to him, he was allowed to watch ones that even people aged a hundred had to watch with their parents.

    Don’t know, he said. They’re usually very angry about something.

    Being dead, you mean?

    Probably, said Wobbler. It can’t be much of a life.

    Johnny thought about this that evening, after meeting the Alderman. The only dead people he had known had been Mr. Page, who’d died in the hospital of something, and his great-grandmother, who’d been ninety-six and had just generally died. Neither of them had been particularly angry people. His great-grandmother had been a bit confused about things, but never angry. He’d visited her in Sunshine Acres, where she watched a lot of television and waited for the next meal to turn up. And Mr. Page had walked around quietly, the only man on the street still at home in the middle of the day.

    They didn’t seem the sort of people who would get up after being dead just to dance with Michael Jackson like in that old movie. And the only thing his great-grandmother would have pushed her way through walls for would be a television that she could watch without having to fight fifteen other old ladies for the remote control.

    It seemed to Johnny that a lot of people were getting things all wrong. He said this to Wobbler. Wobbler disagreed.

    It’s prob’ly all different from a dead point of view, he said.

    Now they were walking along West Avenue. The cemetery was laid out like a town, with streets. They weren’t named very originally—North Drive and South Walk joined West Avenue, for example, at a little graveled area with seats in it. A kind of city center. But the silence of the big Victorian mausoleums made the place look as though it was having the longest early-closing day in the world.

    My dad says this is all going to be built on, said Wobbler. He said the Council sold it to some big company for just fivepence because it was costing so much to keep it going.

    What, all of it? said Johnny.

    That’s what he said, said Wobbler. Even he looked a bit uncertain. He said it was a scandal.

    Even the bit with the poplar trees?

    All of it, said Wobbler. It’s going to be offices or something.

    Johnny looked at the cemetery. It was the only open space for miles.

    I’d have given them at least a pound, he said.

    Yes, but you wouldn’t have been able to build things on it, said Wobbler. That’s the important thing.

    I wouldn’t want to build anything on it. I’d have given them a pound just to leave it as it is.

    Yes, said Wobbler, the voice of reason, but people have got to work somewhere. We Need Jobs.

    I bet the people here won’t be very happy about it, said Johnny. If they knew.

    I think they get moved somewhere else, said Wobbler. It’s got to be something like that. Otherwise you’d never dare dig your garden.

    Johnny looked up at the nearest tomb. It was one of the ones that looked like a shed built of marble. Bronze lettering over the door said:

    ALDERMAN THOMAS BOWLER

    1822–1906

    PRO BONO PUBLICO

    There was a stone carving of—presumably—the Alderman himself, looking seriously into the distance as if he, too, was wondering what Pro Bono Publico meant.

    "I bet he’d be pretty angry," said Johnny.

    He hesitated for a moment, then walked up the couple of broken steps to the metal door and knocked on it. He never did know why he’d done that.

    Here, you mustn’t! hissed Wobbler. Supposing he comes lurchin’ out! Anyway, he said, lowering his voice even more, "it’s wrong to try to talk to the dead. It

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