Ogre, Ogre

Ogre, Ogre is a fantasy novel by the English American writer Piers Anthony, published in 1982. It is one of the books set in Xanth, the invented land of his long fantasy series.

Smash is the character at the centre of it. He is an ogre, and he has a human mother, which makes him an unusual thing to be even in a place as strange as Xanth. That combination is the thing the novel is about.

The ogres of the series are enormous and extremely ugly, and they are also understood to be so stupid that they can hardly be trusted with anything. Smash has to work out what he is if he is not quite the ogre he is supposed to be and not quite a man either.

The book is one of a long run set in the same imaginary country, and it follows the pattern of the series in being comic rather than serious. Smash has to work out what he is, and the book follows him while he does it.