Hogfather recap

The order-loving Auditors of Reality want the Hogfather, the Disc's midwinter gift-bringer, gone, and hire the Assassins' Guild; the commission falls to the brilliant, disturbing Mr Teatime, who has found a way to attack belief itself by seizing control of the operation that collects children's teeth. As faith in the Hogfather drains away, Death takes up the red suit and the sledge and delivers the presents himself, with his manservant Albert assisting, trying to keep the tradition and the children's belief alive. The loose belief that is no longer anchored to the Hogfather spills out and spawns odd new minor gods and creatures. Death's granddaughter Susan, a level-headed governess, investigates and follows the plot into a tower of teeth, a realm shaped by children's imagination. There she confronts and destroys Teatime, breaking his hold, and belief is restored so the Hogfather returns and the sun rises on Hogswatch morning. Death argues that humans must believe small invented things in order to learn to believe in the great abstractions, like justice and mercy.

Previously, in earlier books of the Death sequence: the Disc's personification of Death, a dutiful robed skeleton who gathers the souls of the dying, has repeatedly grown curious about the mortals he collects. He once took a farm boy, Mort, as an apprentice; Mort married Death's adopted daughter, Ysabell, and was made a duke. Later, briefly retired and made mortal by the order-loving Auditors of Reality, Death lived a season as a farmhand and returned to his office with a deepened sympathy for the living. Mort and Ysabell's daughter is Susan, who has inherited a measure of her grandfather's uncanny nature. Having once been drawn into taking up the family duty herself, Susan has since chosen a firmly ordinary life, working as a governess in Ankh-Morpork and keeping her strange inheritance in the background.

As Hogswatch, the Disc's midwinter festival, approaches, the Hogfather, the traditional gift-bringer children believe in, has gone missing, and the order of the season is disturbed. The Assassins' Guild has quietly accepted a strange and secret commission from an unnamed client, handing it to a gifted and unsettling young assassin. Meanwhile Death begins to take an unusual personal interest in the holiday, and his granddaughter Susan, working as a governess, starts to notice that something has gone badly wrong with the way the world is supposed to run.

Teatime's scheme is to end belief in the Hogfather by using the teeth his allies have gathered from children, which grant a form of power over those children. As belief fails, Death personally takes over the Hogfather's Hogswatch rounds to sustain it, delivering gifts across the city while Albert helps and Susan tracks the conspiracy. Susan enters the tower built of teeth, reaches the country of children's beliefs, and confronts Mr Teatime; after he proves hard to put down, she finally kills him and frees the captured belief. With the plot broken, the real Hogfather is recovered and the tradition is saved, so the sun rises on Hogswatch morning as it should rather than failing to appear. The surplus belief that had leaked out leaves behind a scattering of new minor personifications, among them the hapless god of hangovers. Death returns Susan to her ordinary life, but not before setting out his view that humanity needs its small, comforting fictions, the gift-bringer and the tooth fairy, as practice for believing in the larger, unprovable ideas that make people humane.