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I’ve always loved Introductions.
They remind me of when I was a kid, wandering through second-hand bookstores, pulling battered old horror paperbacks from the shelves. Those wrinkled covers, those dog-eared pages, that wonderful, slightly stale smell of stories … Those books pulled you into their own history, made you a part of it, and if you were lucky – like, really lucky – right before the story started you’d find the Author’s Introduction.
This, to a kid who wanted nothing more than to be a writer, was a portal into imagination. I couldn’t Google a writer’s name and read his blog or watch every interview he’d ever done on YouTube (and I hereby wave to some reader way off in the future who’s just read that and is now getting information about “Google” “Blog” and “Youtube” downloaded directly into his brain), so I had to make do with what brief glimpses I was afforded. It was in the Introductions that authors talked about their work and their process, and I scoured these words, searching for the secret to writing, hunting for the Big Clue that would lead me to Where Stories Come From.
I found glimpses of the Big Clue in the words of Stephen King and other masters of the genre, but nothing definite. Still, in many ways it was enough. These glimpses brought with them their own kind of inspiration, and when I was a kid, when I was a teenager, that’s all I needed. My early stories dripped with blood. They were soaked in it. Drenched. I had yet to learn concepts such as subtlety or restraint, and there is definitely a place for subtlety and restraint – but it was not a place that held any interest for me. I was all about the blood, the rawness, the viscera. I was reading King and Clive Barker and James Herbert and Michael Slade and Skipp and Spector and Shaun Hutson and dear GOD the list goes on. My life was blood-soaked books, horror movies and heavy metal.
Ah, youth …
And yet, dig a little deeper and you reveal a love of film noir and craggy detectives in rumpled suits and cool hats. Dig a little more and you uncover a love of westerns inherited from a father, a love of screwball comedies inherited from a mother (and for a kid who has stammered all of his life, to find these movies where everyone talks really really fast was beyond exhilarating), and a love of science fiction and adventure that blossomed in the eighties because of people like Spielberg and Lucas and shows like Knight Rider and Airwolf and The Six Million Dollar Man …
Taking all this into account, I am the sum of my obsessions. I am every movie I’ve ever seen and every book I’ve ever read. I am every song I’ve ever listened to. I am every comic I’ve ever bought. I am entire collections by Joseph Wambaugh and Elmore Leonard and Joe R Lansdale and I am His Dark Materials and I am Harry Potter.
And in all of these things, I have glimpsed the Big Clue. And these glimpses were enough to open my eyes to the ideas swimming naturally through the soup of my mind. It was from that soup that I plucked Skulduggery Pleasant himself, back in the summer of 2005, and he brought with him every genre I’ve ever loved.
He is a detective (crime) who is also a skeleton (horror) who takes on a partner (screwball) and they fight monsters (fantasy) and they save the world (adventure). With a little bit of sci-fi thrown in, to stop things from getting boring.
The stories in this collection – arranged here in chronological order for your reading pleasure – are but fragments of the world that Skulduggery has opened up for me. It is because of him that I am able to write a western and sit it comfortably beside a novella about a middle-aged man revisiting the horrors of his childhood. It is because of him that the tones of these stories shift so radically between one and the next. It is because of him that I have the freedom to write the kind of stories I loved, and continue to love, to read.
And if there is a fledgling writer out there who is searching through this Introduction in an effort to find the Big Clue – the secret to writing that I, along with all the other writers, share only amongst ourselves – I am afraid I must disappoint you. This is something you must find out for yourself, fledgling writer, as the Author’s Code expressly forbids me from speaking of it in public.
I may already have said too much …
Derek Landy,
Dublin
Saint Patrick’s Day, 2014
This was still years before that damn fool Custer stumbled across all that gold in the Black Hills, years before Wounded Knee and the massacre that took place there. This was back before the territory was admitted into the union, back before Deadwood, back even before that pitiful Treaty of Laramie promised the region to the Lakota people, a treaty that, if ever that was one, was drawn up just to be burned.
It was a time of gunfighters and outlaws and hard living and easy dying and, of course, it was a time of mean-spirited, blood-slicked magic.
The Dead Men had travelled east from Wyoming, tracking their quarry, who’d led them a merry dance. But the longer they tracked, the easier it got. This was on account of the fact that their quarry had taken up with a Necromancer named Noche, who was developing a habit of leaving dead folk in his wake. Not regular dead folk, neither, but the kind that jumped up and ran around and had a madness in their dull eyes and a terrible, terrible hunger that could only be sated by human flesh. The kind only fire or a bullet to the brainpan could put down. Thankfully, fire and bullets were what the Dead Men specialised in.
Seven of them, all Irish, some of their accents a little muddied due to all the travelling and the living they’d done. There was Saracen Rue, all easy charm and easy smiles, like a man trying to convince himself he’s nicer than he is. Beside him rode Dexter Vex, one of the more thoughtful of the group, though he wasn’t one to show it. The quiet one with the week’s worth of stubble was Anton Shudder, and a scarier man was hard to find, even in this forsaken land. There was Erskine Ravel, recently returned from his sojourn to lands even more foreign and forsaken than this one, and Hopeless, a man of one name and many faces.
Riding in the lead was the scarred man, Ghastly Bespoke, and beside him the living skeleton, the one who looked like the Grim Reaper himself, the first of the Four Horsemen written about in the Bible and shouted about from pulpits up and down this wounded and pockmarked country.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
Skulduggery Pleasant’s clothes were scuffed and faded, and his coat was long and may have been black once upon a time. Among normal folk, what these men called ‘mortals’, he’d take that kerchief from around his neck there and tie it over all those teeth that were fixed in that permanent grin, and he’d pull that hat down low over those empty eye sockets. He had two pistol belts, criss-crossing low and held in place with tie-downs, and in those holsters he had guns with pearl handles and long barrels. Colt Walkers, they were. Guns built for stopping men.
They’d been riding for days and their horses were tired and thirsty, and the riders with flesh were chafed and sore. They came upon the town of Forbidden, and didn’t think much of it. A town of three streets and dirty people who bathed not often or well. There was a mangy dog lying in the middle of the street, who looked at them with mild indifference as they passed. When they were safely gone, the dog offered up a feeble growl, then lay back down and went to sleep or died. Didn’t make much difference to anyone which one it was.
They found the