'Skulduggery Pleasant' by Derek Landy

'Skulduggery Pleasant' has become quietly popular in the past year. It's a horror-fantasy series in 9-12 with a good dash of comedy and lighthearted jibing. The idea is pretty standard: girl's kooky and significant caregiver (well, uncle, in this case, as her parents are a bit distracted) dies and she inherits a house/mystery/power which will lead her on adventures/trials/quests as nasty men try and take it away/use it for evil/kill her for the fun of it.

Same old same old, but the selling point with this series is its panache. The cover of the first book proclaims 'And he's the good guy!', referring to Skulduggery Pleasant, the eminently likeable, sharp-dressing, Bentley-driving wizard-skeleton of the title. As might be suggested by the entire book being named after him, this is Skul's show. He's a memorable character with a good backstory and a suprisingly complex set of characteristics, once you get past the wise-cracking. I'm skeptical of overt attempts at zany comedy in children's books, as very, very few can manage it well. If it doesn't happen naturally as part of the style, injecting it artificially can be disastrous. Luckily, Derek Landy is pretty good on the whole. The conversations are zingy (though they do at times feel like a screen play) and zany antics never lessen the importance of the plot or jarr too badly with the action. There are things that don't work: Stephanie's petty aunt and uncle are caricatures on a level with the Sackville-Bagginses, but not anywhere near as subtle and Stephanie's father is so absent-minded that it makes you wonder if Landy is trying to foreshadow a later revelation about an early-onset cognitive degenerative disease, in which case making jokes about it is entirely inappropriate. The ongoing jibes about the canary-coloured car were a little random and seemed to exist purely to give fuel for snarky conversations.

Despite Skulduggery being a pretty awesome character, he doesn't actually dominate too much. He's mostly there as a memetic tag - if you remember one thing about this book, you'll remember the walking, talking skeleton who's one of the good guys. Stephanie, the heroine, is surprisingly well-drawn, not too idealised, but spunky enough to root for. She makes mistakes, but remains pretty indomitable, and Landy manages to draw us into sympathising with light but careful gestures. The one criticism I had is that she seems a bit older than twelve. I don't think I was as confident and worldly at sixteen as Stephanie is at twelve, and she's had a pretty sheltered life. I'd have preferred her to be maybe fourteen, at which point it's more good sense than precociousness. Still, that's a minor niggle.

The plot is roughly as it is mapped out above, but that would be underselling it. The Macguffin that's going to destroy the world is a sideline to our exploration, through Stephanie's eyes, of an interesting new fantasy world, in which magic isn't always pretty and the lines of battle aren't always straightforward. There were memorable characters I wanted to know more about: Mr Bliss was decidedly cool, for instance. China Sorrows' library is lovely (but then, give me a magical library in a fantasy world and I'm sold) and the Cleavers are genuinely creepy, though that might be because they had uncomfortable resonances of Pyramid Head about them. This is a fantasy world I'm eager to read more of, and I'm glad it's as popular as it is. Not necessarily for everyone, and so missing the elusive Harry Potter mark, but something I'm wholeheartedly enthusiastic about. It's well-written, action-packed and just plain fun, kind of like an iced party ring biscuit - it won't fill you up or give you something to chew over, but it's light and bright and sweet, and damnably tasty with a grounding of biscuit to anchor it down. Maybe that metaphor stretched too far...