Skulduggery Pleasant – The Dying of the Light

Derek Landy's The Dying of the Light is a dark, very funny fantasy for 11 year olds about a skeleton detective hunting for the person who used to be his best friend.

What happens

This comes late in the Skulduggery Pleasant books, and its whole starting point is how the books before it end. If your reader is new to Skulduggery, start with the first one and save this for much later.

Valkyrie Cain is gone. In her place is Darquesse, an almost unstoppable power wearing her face, and she's hiding somewhere in the world. Skulduggery has to find her and stop her.

His new partner is Stephanie. She started out as Valkyrie's reflection, a copy who went to school and ate family dinners so Valkyrie didn't have to. Now she's a real girl with real feelings, and she isn't at all sure where she fits.

That's what makes this one special. Stephanie has no magic, just a stick that gives electric shocks and an ancient sceptre, and she's desperate to prove she's worth having around. She practises cool lines from films. Skulduggery keeps interrupting them. (She is NOT happy about that.)

There's a ticking clock too. A machine that boosts sorcerers' powers is going to overload in about two weeks, and if it does, every sorcerer on Earth goes mad at once.

The jokes are as sharp as ever. A robot with a smiley face drawn on its head tells Stephanie it would like to be a puppet. Her dad is watching a film he doesn't understand and decides it's probably about a bird.

It's worth knowing just how dark this gets, even at the top of this shelf. The fights are brutal. Stephanie is punched again and again by monsters with skin like leathery paper, and she slashes them open with kitchen knives. A villain is being made to suffer terrible pain for twenty-three hours a day as a punishment. A hitman stands beside a floating, sleeping girl with a dagger and thinks about killing her. There's some mild swearing too.

For a reader who has grown up with these books, it's gripping. For anyone younger or more sensitive, it's one to come back to.

What to read next

If Stephanie's story is the part they love, a copy who suddenly wants to be a person, try TrooFriend. Ivy is an android sold as the perfect friend, and the news is full of rumours that some of her model have started having feelings.