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| Image credit: Skulduggery Pleasant Wiki-Fandom |
'No one is safe.' That’s the tagline for the penultimate book in the Skulduggery Pleasant series –before
Landy returned for series 2- and it could not be more apt! Not only is Last Stand of Dead Men a non-stop thrill
ride of battles, magic, drama, adventure, horror, and gore, characters and
readers alike are not the spared the sufferings that come from that expression
‘war is Hell’.
Everything that has been simmering underneath the surface of whatever
world threat Detectives Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie Cain have faced over
the past several years comes to a head in the climactic, second to last
instalment. Last Stand of Dead Men
chronicles non-stop, world-shattering battles as war is declared between
Sanctuaries, the suspicious Children of the Spider come out of the shadows with
their insidious plan to expose magic, Valkyrie goes head to head with her own
reflection, and the voice of Darquesse becomes ever harder to quieten.
It’s a cruel, dramatic irony that we know the hidden agendas well before
they come out in the open to wreak havoc on our favourite characters. On the
one hand our own emotional torment is prolonged (character investment depending
of course) as we watch our favourites wander blindly into traps or do
exactly what the villain wants them to do, but on the other hand the feeling of
liberation and relief is just so darned delicious when finally all Hell breaks
loose. And in this book certainly, all Hell does
break loose!
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| Image credit: Skulduggery Pleasant Wiki-Fandom |
Landy expertly finds the perfect balance between hammering readers over
the head with action and lulling them into a coma with exposition, providing us
with the ideal spaces to take a breath, reflect on what we’ve just read, and
let all the impending emotions completely wash over us. Simultaneously, while
there is a lot that we know that the characters do not, there’s a whole bunch
of stuff that we don’t know and when the shit hits the fan, which happens
frequently here, there are quite a number of gut-wrenching twists of the plot
that really throw you for a loop and leave you emotionally crippled.
Every page brings a new wave of action, adventure, horror, and
excitement and, of course, we get to see all of our favourite characters in
their element, doing what they do best.
Last Stand of Dead Men is the penultimate instalment in
the first wave of the Skulduggery
Pleasant series by Derek Landy. It was written in 2013 and published by
HarperCollins Children’s Books.
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