Skulduggery Pleasant – DaneCobain.com

Shane Hegarty – Darkmouth | Review

Title: Darkmouth

Author: Shane Hegarty

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 416

Rating: 10/10

Shane Hegarty – Darkmouth

Disclaimer: While I aim to be unbiased, I received a copy of this for free to review.

I haven’t read a series debut that was this good in a long time, and that’s the truth – I might have received this book for free, but I’ll be buying the next one myself, when it comes out. Hegarty’s Darkmouth is a small Irish town that’s the last place in the world that’s still under attack from monsters – Legends, to give them their full title.

The Legends are able to attack the streets of Darkmouth by creating portals between their world, which is an arid, acrid wasteland, and our own. All that stands between them is twelve-year-old Finn, the last Legend Hunter. Finn’s being trained by his father who’s hoping to pass on the skill, but he’s not a natural – he tries hard, but he does more harm than good, and he secretly hopes to become a vet when he grows up.

This, then, is a coming of age story, and it’s a beauty – a super exciting new series that has serious potential. It might not dethrone Harry Potter, but it could easily overtake the Skulduggery Pleasant series and pose a serious threat to the likes of Artemis Fowl, the author of which described this book as “incredible, the next big thing.”

Shane Hegarty

The village of Darkmouth is also a lot easier to visualise thanks to the epic illustrations that are dotted throughout the book, as well as online in the form of animated YouTube videos (unless I dreamt that). Harper Collins has done a great job here, it just exudes quality everywhere it exists – there must’ve been a pretty big team working on this one, ’cause it looks to me as though they’ve covered every angle.

Even the cover is epic, and I’m not just talking about the artwork – the spine is ridged, and feels like snakeskin if you run your fingers over it. It’s the little touches like that which make this book stand apart from most of the other young adult books on the market, and both the publisher and the author should be proud of this.

Fingers crossed that the rest of the series follows suit, because this is one hell of a promising start. The potential for the story to be developed seems almost limitless, and I can’t wait to find out what Finn gets up to next.

Darkmouth

Click here to buy Darkmouth.

Derek Landy – Skulduggery Pleasant: The Dying of the Light | Review

Title: Skulduggery Pleasant: The Dying of the Light

Author: Derek Landy

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 605

Rating: 8/10

Derek Landy - Skullduggery Pleasant: The Dying of the Light

Derek Landy – Skulduggery Pleasant: The Dying of the Light

Disclaimer: While I aim to be unbiased, I received a copy of this for free to review.

This book messed with my mind, man – at first, I really struggled to get in to it, and I could never tell who was who, whether they were good guys or bad guys or even what they were actually doing. But then I got absorbed, after the first hundred pages or so, and everything got a lot more exciting.

I get the feeling that I would’ve suspended my disbelief a little sooner if I’d read the earlier books in the series, because the author seems to assume that you know a lot about his fictional world, although the occasional exposition that he uses to fill you in on what happened earlier is actually well-handled and subtle enough that you don’t even notice what’s happening.

Which is a good thing, because there’s a lot going on – people dying left, right and centre, and occasionally coming back to life, switching allegiance or doing something else that’s equally surprising. It gets confusing to say the least, although I suspect it’ll be easier to understand it all if you’ve started the series from the beginning.

Derek Landy

And from what I understand, quite a lot of people do just that – when I was reading this at work, one of my colleagues stopped me and asked to take a look at the cover. It turns out that her kids, and her kids’ friends, are obsessed with the Skulduggery Pleasant series, in the same way that my own generation was obsessed with Harry Potter.

In fact, when I first started reading the novel, I did detect the influence of the Harry Potter series, and to begin with I was worried that it might just be a rip-off. It turns out I was wrong – the world of the Skulduggery Pleasant series is completely different, and in places I think it weakens the plot-line. Magic needs some universal laws that must always be obeyed, otherwise it can just be used to explain away gaps in the story, as it was occasionally used here.

But despite that, The Dying of the Light is a pretty compelling read, and once I really got in to it, I did find it hard to put it down. Sure, the barrier to entry is a little high if you haven’t read the other books in the series, but once you get past that, you’ll be interested in the huge collection of characters on offer, and I bet that you’ll find a favourite and settle down with the back catalogue to read about what happened to them before the events of The Dying of the Light kicked off.

Valkyrie Cain

I don’t want to go in to too much detail about the plot, partly because it’s too complicated to go in to and partly because I don’t want to spoil it – suffice to say that if you’re in to magic, fantasy and the fight of good against evil, then you’re going to enjoy it. Hell, I’m not even going to tell you who wins!

The only problem for me, when you consider the target audience of kids and young adults, was the level of gore that the book contains – it seems like every couple of pages, someone’s being beheaded, dismembered or otherwise brutally murdered, even some peripheral characters who the author could’ve left alive. It might bother you if you’re reading it to kids.