I do like the subtitle / strap-line to Derek Landy’s latest Skulduggery Pleasant novel, DEATH BRINGER, which runs thusly: ‘Kicking Evil Very Hard in the Face’. Nice. Skulduggery Pleasant, of course, is the dead / undead / skeletal private eye who takes on all comers in the battle between Good and Evil, aided and abetted by his feisty sidekick, Valkyrie. At least, that was the story in the first book in the series, SKULDUGGERY PLEASANT, which established Derek Landy as a genre-busting writer of YA crime novels par excellence, and which I thoroughly enjoyed, not least for its subversive black humour.
I’ve been busy in the intervening couple of years, so I haven’t really been keeping track of Skulduggery Pleasant, but it would appear that I’ve been nowhere as busy as Derek Landy, whose DEATH BRINGER is the sixth in the Skulduggery Pleasant series. Yep, sixth. Quoth the blurb elves:
The sixth instalment in the historic, hysterical and horrific Skulduggery Pleasant series. Think you’ve seen anything yet? You haven’t. Because the Death Bringer is about to rise … The Necromancers no longer need Valkyrie to be their Death Bringer, and that’s a Good Thing. There’s just one catch. There’s a reason the Necromancers don’t need her any more. And that’s because they’ve found their Death Bringer already, the person who will dissolve the doors between life and death. And that’s a Very, Very Bad Thing …So there you have it. Given the way my mind works, and that Skulduggery Pleasant and Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl tend to play both sides of the Good / Evil line, I can’t help wondering who would triumph in a YA literary smack-down. Hell, I may even toddle along to the Mountains to Sea Festival on Sunday, September 11, when Derek Landy will be holding forth on all things Pleasant and Skulduggerish, and ask that very question. For all the details on the event, clickety-click here …
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