What "free stuff", Roman?

I too hoped that Maladict (and to some extent, Jackrum) would be allowed to stay male. I was also somewhat let down by Alice(- the girl who was possessed by Duchess' spirit) slipping into a coma at the end of the novel - a tidy, yet cheap way of dealing with a character, in my opinion.

I can't defend the book (it made me depressed for days) but I can defend Pterry :p . I got the feeling that he was REALLY angry and upset with the world when he wrote MR. Maybe because of the Iraq/Afghanistan war, maybe for some other reason. If it's the former, then maybe at the time all he could picture in his mind was the dark and horrible aspects of war ("I had to kill that boy to get you his water canteen - I had to watch his eyes while he died!"), while failing to come up with any solution. Then, a whiles later, the solution (sort of) occured to him, and thus we have Thud.