Skulduggery Pleasant: Mortal Coil by Derek Landy

Target Audience: Kids/Teens/Everyone else
Genre: Fantasy/Horror/Humour

As with most books that i totally love, i'm going to struggle to write a review, infact its taken me a few days just to finally put fingers to keyboard.

Mortal Coil begins around about half a year after the end of dark days. Valkyrie is trying to find out how to stop herself from destroying the world and they are still trying to establish a new Sancturary in Ireland. Meanwhile, there's a giant psychotic man in a metal mask running around murdering people. So in short, it's all action from the very start!


There are several things about this series that i love and the first of these is the characters. Stephanie/Valkyrie is one of the most amusing and headstrong female leads i've ever read about. She witty, sarcastic and yet loving and caring at the same time. Her emotional human side clearly has an affect on skulduggery and yet she can hold her own against most things that are thrown her way.
Skulduggery himself is still as funny and awesome as ever. I would love to be friends with him. And the way he converses with Valkyrie just borderlines hilarious in some instances. I loved how their friendship changed in this book, and you see how much stronger there friendship has become because of the events in this book. Fletcher is also just as vain and annoying as in dark days, but he displays a lot more of his caring/loving qualities in this book (particularly in that scene near the end of the novel with Valkyrie, awwwww)
With regards to the plot, it seemed somewhat darker in this novel, but then this is understandable considering that they are dealing with someone who can destroy the world. The atmosphere itself was terrifying and some of the events borderlined disturbing and i felt chills creeping up my spine just imagining what would happen if this actually happened in reality.
Having said that, there isn't any lack of witty banter and humour in this book and i found myself laughing a lot despite the darker tone. Whether it's the geniune laugh out loud funny parts or just the one liners and conversation from Skulduggery and Valkyrie, there's plenty to make you laugh.
On that note, i must confess this is one of the things that never ceases to amaze me about Mr Landy, his ability to blend laugh out loud humour with an adrenaline fuelled adventure/horror story. The guy is a genius (and his dedications at the front of the novel were amusing too!)

Anyway, in short. This is a twisty, emotional, frightening, funny novel that ends with enough of a cliffhanger (or several more like) to ensure that all readers (me included) will come back for more. Whether your 13, 23 (like me) or 103, this book is AMAZING!!!