"You're not afraid of spiders, are you?" "I tend to get slightly arachnophobic when they're three times the size of me." Derek Landy, I hate you. And I love you. You give us these amazing characters, tell amazing stories AND THEN YOU END THEM LIKE THIS?! HOW ON EARTH (or Dimension X, whatever!) AM I SUPPOSED TO WAIT FOR THE NEXT BOOK, hu?! Even reading this for the second time, this ending hit hard. So... yeah. I might have shook this book after finishing it. I saw it coming but it still got me. I mean... Valkyrie is (once more) the destroyer of worlds and her little sister is supposed to be the one to stop her eight years from now?! And Omen and Auger are both playing a little game with Death here. Who's dead, who's alive? Will Darquesse really come back? I mean, of course she will because I suppose this is how this whole Faceless One child thing will come to pass. But Landy leaves all this wide open until we get the next book. This book waited till page 7 to crush my heart. At least it started there, the real crushing came later: when I first heared Valkyrie say that she has a girlfriend, I put it on the circumstances and didn't believe it. But hey, it's real, she and Militsa are a thing. And while I usually really appreciate and love queer relationships in books and I love that Landy goes "They all live that long, they're all pan, that's just logical", my heart broke because my shipper heart beats for the Skeleton Detective and his Valkyrie. Bedlam is a great story with a lot of storylines (yes, it was a little confusing at times...) but we get the humor we love this series for, we get magic adventures and we have characters that don't just brush off the awful things they experienced. It's not all just better, Valkyrie is still trying to get better and life just keeps coming for her. She knows she's not alright and it shows. Well, of course there's parts of the book that are about the Darkly brothers. Three books in and I've got no clue on how I feel about them. Omen's nice enough but I caught myself wanting to read another perspective a couple times when it was his turn. Also, I want to punch Never because she/he can't really call him/herself Omen's friend. As for Auger... I don't have a clear picture of him. I don't really want to brand him a douchebag but sometimes I get this arrogant vibe from him and the next second he'll be worried about his friends or his brother... As always, there's also a bit of the books dedicated to the storyline in the White House. I always forget the president's name, but I'm pretty sure it's spelled T-R-U-M-P. And Landy captures him perfectly. (Honestly: his chapters might be the most horrifying ones in the whole series!) Enough rambling from me. I loved it, it's Skulduggery Pleasant at it's best.