Experience Skulduggery Pleasant as never before – in this fully original graphic novel brought vibrantly to life in full colour.
A small town in the middle of Ireland, a string of unexplained deaths and a monster on the loose. Better call in the experts.
When Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie Cain drive into Termoncara, they discover a town with a dark past and a people haunted by their own secrets. There is a creature stalking the streets – a creature who delights in cruelty, who feeds off the little hatreds, who grows stronger with every drop of blood spilled.
Horror and mystery collide in an original graphic novel by Derek Landy, P. J. Holden, Matt Soffe, Rob Jones and Pye Parr.
Skulduggery Pleasant
What I love most about the Skulduggery Pleasant books is the humour. Without it the darkness would be overwhelming, but it also doesn’t undermine the intensity of some harrowing scenes! I wasn’t sure how much an illustrated fight scene (because, let’s face it, there are a lot of fight scenes) would keep that balance and worried the violence might become the most important part of the story…but it still works! Derek Landy’s script was limned by P.J. Holden, coloured by Matt Soffe and lettered by Rob Jones (I must give thanks to the excellent Comics Review blog post about it for this detail).
Be warned though, it is pitched older than the first novels, there is a 15+ rating on the back cover.
You can read a sample on the Skulduggery Pleasant website to get a taste for it. I’m pleased it wasn’t an adaptation but a whole new story, quite an unexpected but very current storyline about intolerance & guilt that is pretty hard going but very satisfying!
I was given a copy by Harper Collins to review but also knew that I’d have a few students desperate to read it so ordered it for school…my biggest Skulduggery fans absolutely loved it. They inhaled the book and want to see more of Jamie. One said it was too short but another said that they really liked how fast paced it was and found it even more un-put-down-able than the original novels. They then had the disappointment of realising that it is the only one (so far) and they couldn’t move straight onto the next book like they had with the series! The other brilliant thing about it though is that it has tempted some students that have been put off reading the novels because they get quite long, it can definitely live as a ‘stand-alone’ with no prior knowledge necessary.
Bad Magic is out now!
