Bedlam

Image credit: Booktopia

So I was very excited when I was K-Mart a little while ago and discovered that there was a new Skulduggery Pleasant book out! So you can guess what I’ve been reading this week!

Bedlam follows the ever-growing pile of life-threatening adventures that follow Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie Cain wherever they go. On top of tracking down Nye and going against the High Sanctuary itself so that Valkyrie and heal her sister’s soul, they have Abyssinia’s great war to prevent, Valkyrie’s vision of the Darkly brothers’ demise to stop from coming to pass, and her parents to come out to.

The humour, adventure, excitement, and drama that we have come to love and expect from this series continues on in Bedlam, but there’s a new element added in the form of Valkyrie’s inner emotional turmoils, which somehow magically get ramped to 11! 

Landy’s attempts to visually manifest depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other mental illnesses and imbalances work for the purposes of the novel and blend in with the series’ already crazy-full back catalogue of drama and excitement, but falls down a little in that it (for obvious reasons) cannot receive the same treatment and thus give the reader the same emotional payoff when there is the inevitable confrontation and showdown, even if its only in Valkyrie’s mind. So that part of the book, while totally apt in the theme promised by the title, does leave a little to be desired and, while treated somewhat realistically, it doesn’t work with the pace and pattern of the book’s other dramas and sort of gets left hanging.

Image credit: Skulduggery Pleasant Wiki Fandom

Aside from this one, very minute criticism, I really enjoyed Bedlam and managed to power my way through it just as fast as I have all the others. After I recalled some of the central plot points, the whole thing was another classic Landy rollercoaster, pocked with wonderful peaks and gut-dropping dips that left me wanting more… even though I picked the big reveal before it happened.

Bedlam is the thirteenth book in the Skulduggery Pleasant series by Derek Landy. It was published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2019.