Taylor Caldwell’s gods and Terry Pratchett’s elves

Taylor Caldwell and Terry Pratchett wrote very different types of books, but they both touched on the subject of humans as playthings of evil and sadistic supernatural beings.

They describe one aspect of this phenomenon in much the same way, although they use different words and blame different paranormal entities.

From Taylor Caldwell’s Romance of Atlantis:

“...the gods amuse themselves by tormenting us. They fire us with thirst, then give us stagnant water with which to quench that thirst. They endow the sensitive with majestic desires, with yearnings for beauty, with radiant spirits with which they might enjoy glorious things, and then let these unhappy wretches eat out their hearts in unsatisfied longings.“

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel Lords and Ladies contains some warnings about elves. I quoted him in an article about energy vampires. Here is a relevant extract:  

“All they can give is gold that melts away in the morning. They make us want what we can't have, and what they give us is worth nothing and what they take is everything and all that is left for us is the cold hillside and emptiness and the laughter of the elves.”

Being tormented by unsatisfied longings, being made to want what they can’t have and being left empty and desolate happens to people in this world too. What the two authors say above will seem spot on to them, a perfect description of what happened to them and how they feel about it.

Taylor Caldwell’s Atlantean gods, who sound more like demons to me, can’t be blamed for this misery in our world, nor can Terry Pratchet’s malevolent Discworld elves.

Is this suffering just a part of life for certain types of people, divine discontent and all that, or are sinister unseen influences at work in our world too?