Skulduggery Pleasant: Dark Days

Image credit: Skulduggery Pleasant Wiki-Fandom

And so the great and macabre adventures of Valkyrie Cain and Skulduggery Pleasant continue… and they’re only going to get darker and more dangerous from here on out.

After taking out a few Faceless Ones and closing the portal to an alternate universe, Valkyrie has one thing on her mind: to reopen the gateway and rescue Skulduggery. Life now is filled with back-alley transactions and shady detective work of her own with the help of some new friends that the magical community (Skulduggery included) would reprimand her for. But hey, there’re no shades of grey when Valkyrie’s got a job to do. Continuing her string of bad luck, her rescue mission is blocked at every step of the way and it’s made worse when she discovers that there’s a club of villains rallying together with a common vendetta: revenge on her.

While I don’t want to keep comparing Skulduggery Pleasant with Harry Potter, the series do share some common characteristics: their readership grows with their heroes, the series begins singularly quest-driven, and then there is that one book that works as the bridge between the episodical adventures and the bigger, continuing story. For Harry Potter that book was The Prisoner of Azkaban, for Skulduggery Pleasant it’s Dark Days.

It's the fourth book in the series so characters, the world, and everything else is clearly established and the audience is snugly entrenched. Dark Days, while still being driven by the quest narrative, is the book where the larger story comes into view. The world becomes bigger, its twists and turns becoming more pronounced, and those minute details that you didn’t think meant anything in the first book come back to bite.

Image credit: Skulduggery Pleasant Wiki-Fandom

Our wonderful characters continue to develop, with more and more questions rising and seeds of doubt being planted as to what and who these people really are. The intrigue is delightful; wonderfully established, if not at all subtle, and while some of the plot twists and character turns might prove predicable, the reading experience of Dark Days is compelling and still just as exiting as its predecessors. Landy’s darker turn in tone and ambiance is obvious, but magnificently it doesn’t create that feeling of disjointedness that Prisoner of Azkaban suffered from, so the read is still as fun as it ever was.

With more action, character growth, humour, and gore, Dark Days is another successful page-turner in an already awesome series.

Dark Days is the fourth book in Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant series and was published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2010.