Skulduggery Pleasant: The Dying of the Light

Image credit: Goodreads

This is it. We’ve come to the end…well at least the end for now. Here is the final book in the Skulduggery Pleasant series: The Dying of the Light.

With Darquesse at large the end of the world is imminent unless Detective Skulduggery Pleasant can come up with a clever plan to prevent it. But between hunting down unstable accelerated sorcerers, trying to find an alternate dimension to shunt a war criminal to, and attempting to concoct a plan to save Valkyrie Cain, Pleasant’s got a lot on his plate. But never fear, it’s not like things have ever gone wrong for the skeleton detective before…

The Dying of the Light is without a doubt another classic and rollicking adventure in an already fantastic series. Like with a number of the larger volumes in the series, there is so much action and drama crammed in to get resolved that it poses a great conundrum: do you put the book down to (hopefully) regain feeling in your head and legs or do you keep reading to find out what happens? After so much death, drama, and destruction, how can the end be happy? How can there be emotional payoff?

In true Skulduggery Pleasant style, everything wraps itself up in the end and all the problems get worked out, sometimes in the most annoyingly simple of ways. Landy is one of the few writers that I’ve come across who can create an emotionally significant and important scene within the pages, persuade you to resign yourself to the inevitable (even though it’s going to hurt) and then completely push you over with a solution that –in any other book- would be a total cheat and swindle, but works perfectly here because it’s characteristically typical. It would be so bad and annoying if it weren't so damned right!

Image credit: Skulduggery Pleasant Wiki-Fandom

Just a heads up that there is a parallel story running alongside the central battle to save the world, that is written in the present tense and does throw you off a little before you actually get used to it, but aside from that the book is completely in keeping with the remainder of the series and stands as a perfectly marvellous ending. Sometimes the increased levels of gore got a little bit too gruesome for my liking, but honestly it does make you appreciate the characters more when they somehow manage to shake it off. We’re talking much more than broken bones and sword gashes.

A wonderful end to a brilliant series of adventures, The Dying of the Light had me up past midnight powering through the last hundred pages… and I regret nothing!

The Dying of the Light is the final instalment in Derek Landy’s original Skulduggery Pleasant series and was published by Harper Collins Children’s Books in 2014.