Skulduggery Pleasant – Midnight

Derek Landy's Midnight is a creepy, funny and properly dark fantasy for 11 year olds that opens with a skeleton lying in the snow behind a sniper rifle.

What happens

It sits deep in the Skulduggery Pleasant series and carries straight on from the book before, so a newcomer should start with the very first one.

Skulduggery and Valkyrie have spent seven months hunting a villain called Abyssinia and getting nowhere. Their latest lead takes them to a castle in the mountains guarded by Wretchlings, stitched-together monsters he picks off one by one from a ledge. (Valkyrie wonders if they can feel pain. He thinks not.)

Inside is Doctor Nye, a very tall, very old scientist who's done terrible things. Nye tells them about a prisoner who was experimented on in that castle for sixty years.

Back home, a doorway has opened just outside the city walls into another reality, one where a cruel sorcerer called Mevolent still rules. Thousands of exhausted people are trudging through it with their bags and their children's dolls. Nobody quite knows what to do with them.

And at school, Omen Darkly finally plucks up the courage to ask a girl out. He's rehearsed it in the mirror. It goes about as well as you'd expect (you'll be wincing with him the whole way).

That mix is what makes these books. One minute it's a fight in a castle, the next Skulduggery is offering to stop for pizza because Valkyrie hasn't eaten since noon. She wants to call the other world Dimension X. He refuses.

Be warned that it's grim in places. The Wretchlings fall apart into a heap of steaming body parts. Skulduggery calmly lists Nye's old experiments, heads kept alive in jars among them. One of the villains used to be a professor who murdered his own students. And Valkyrie stands on a cliff edge and feels a strong pull to step off, which is a quiet moment but an upsetting one.

For a reader who's come all the way through the series, it's a must. For anyone younger, or new to Skulduggery, it's one to save.

What to read next

If the doorway into another world is the bit that grips them, Into the Sideways World might be next. Willa is twelve, the news is full of a war creeping closer, and a new boy called Manny is about to help her find what she calls the Sideways World.