Skulduggery Pleasant: Mortal Coil

By Derek Landy

Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie Cain are back--just in time to see their whole world turn upside down! While they struggle to protect a known killer from an unstoppable assassin, Valkyrie is on a secret mission of her own. This quest, to prevent her dark and murderous destiny, threatens to take her to the brink of death and beyond. And then the body-snatching Remnants get loose, thousands of twisted souls who possess the living like puppets, and they begin their search for a being powerful enough to lead them. Facing such insurmountable odds, Skulduggery, Valkyrie, Ghastly, and Tanith can trust no one. Not even each other.


Skulduggery Pleasant is by far the darkest book series I’ve ever read. I usually stay clear of horror in all shapes and forms because it tends to get gory and makes me feel nasty inside. Derek Landy though, I just keep coming back to Skulduggery because I love the characters, and the humor. Oh the humor. It’s by far the best part of the series! I laugh out loud at the witty clever and ridiculous things that they say. It’s such a juxtaposed theme: you’ve got horror (legitimate horror mind you) and then you’ve got laugh-so-hard-I cried parts.

This, the 5^th book in the series, was quite a bit darker than I expected, at parts I had to put the book down to just look up and see that the sun was indeed still shining outside. Between Valkyrie trying to figure out how to escape the future that has been foretold for her, figuring out how to capture and stop the Remnants, and just trying to not die this book is action packed to the extreme. The hard thing about reviewing this series is that you don’t want to spoil anything, and the plot is so intertwined it’s almost impossible to talk about it without giving something away! I will say this though: if you like humor and horror, keep on reading Skulduggery. Holy cow is this a great read. Plot. Writing. Characters. Everything is just top notch.

I give it a 4 out of 5