Apocalypse Kings
The Skulduggery Pleasant series, Book 5.6
Derek Landy
HarperCollins
Fiction, YA? Adventure/Fantasy/Horror/Humor/Mystery
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Adedayo thought he'd been cursed when objects started flying off shelves around him. It wasn't until his Nigerian grandmother came to stay with his family in Dublin that he learned about the hidden community of sorcerers and adepts and other bearers of magic, a family trait that skipped his mother but apparently manifested in him. Unfortunately, she spoke little English and he knew almost no Yoruban, and she passed away before teaching him more than a few small tricks - but she left him a strange wooden box and a cryptic phrase he struggles to understand. Inside the box are three powerful gods, trapped since the wars against the Faceless Ones... and when Adedayo inadvertently unleashes them, something terrible is bound to happen.
Fortunately, the next day at school, he meets a peculiar new girl: Valkyrie Cain, another mage. Along with her partner Skulduggery Pleasant - a literal walking skeleton - she has come to track down the so-called Apocalypse Kings before they can enact their eons-old plan. They have reason to believe that the gods are currently hiding somewhere in his school... but their efforts to blend in as they search are hardly seamless. The two investigators may need a little help with this job, but what can an untrained sorcerer who can barely summon a spark do against a trio of vengeance-minded deities?
REVIEW: This novella feels like an oddball in the series, and it is, written later as a (near) standalone project for World Book Day. This may explain why it feels a little neither-here-nor-there; it ostensibly takes place after the fifth book (which I just read via audiobook earlier this very week), but Valkyrie and Skulduggery don't quite "feel" like the characters I just left. Of course, this is written from an outsider's perspective - not just outside the core duo, but outside the Dublin magical community - but even given Adedayo's ignorance of the quite terrible and pivotal horrors that just elapsed in Dublin's magical community (though one might think he would've noticed the citywide lockdown, even if he didn't know the truth), this story just doesn't seem to fit where the chronology claims it fits.
Disregarding some wobbly continuity with the larger whole, the story has a more or less similar aesthetic, humor melding with horror. Some deliberate tweaks of school story cliches add to the humor, such as when the obligatory "meet the cliques" lunchroom talk reveals that nobody's really that shallow as to identify themselves solely by one aspect of their personalities. Adedayo himself is technically 15, but reads a bit younger, possibly because he's such a neophyte to magic and also because he's still very confused and unsettled about his own life, not sure what he even wants to do now, let alone in the future; he's in debate club because he was told he needs an extracurricular for future college applications, but he hates arguing and always loses. When Valkyrie arrives after the gods escape, he's relieved that there's someone older and more experienced to take charge. Granted, she's only a year older, but she acts almost adult in her confidence, not too surprising given what she's been through. Skulduggery, meanwhile, tries to go undercover as a schoolteacher, complicated by the fact that it's been ages - almost literally - since he had to interact with "mortals", and he's not even used to wearing a (false) flesh-and-blood face. When things inevitably go wrong, Adedayo ends up being the one who has to step up. Things wrap up pretty well by the end.
I came close to shaving a half-star for that "this doesn't quite fit" sense, which made me feel a bit more like I was reading rather good but noncanon fanfic than an official series entry, but wound up giving it the benefit of the doubt.
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