On May 1, Playaway launched two popular kid's titles from Harper Children's Audio: Skulduggery Pleasant (2007) and, the first of several sequels, Skulduggery Pleasant - Playing with Fire (2008).
The third and fourth books, Skulduggery Pleasant - The Faceless Ones (2009) and Skulduggery Pleasant - Dark Days (published earlier this year), are coming soon. A fifth book, Skulduggery Pleasant - Mortal Coil is due in the Fall.
I don't want to get too deep into the literary merits of author Derek Landy's creation. Aspects of the story are really quite clever. The title character is a skeleton detective -- not a Sam Spade type who searches for missing bones, but himself a walking, talking, fire-hurling skeleton in a sharp suit who fights the bad guys and stands up for the innocent.
He also happens to be an ancient death-defying "mage" or wizard with a centuries-long grudge against the evil-doer who robbed him of his family and reduced him to his skeletal state.
So far, so good. Some of the other plot elements, however, may sound a little familiar to readers of contemporary young people's fantasy literature: an evil wizard bent on world domination, a race to find the ancient magical object that will enable him to carry out his nefarious deeds (his name, by the way, is Nefarian Serpine), and a teenage girl named Stephanie, who's mistakenly under the impression that she's an ordinary misfit but discovers that -- get this! -- she's actually part of an exciting magical world she never new existed. Can Stephanie and Skulduggery thwart the evil Serpine and save the world? I wouldn't want to spoil it for you.
So perhaps it's not exactly the kind of book that will be regarded as a classic a hundred years from now, but for audiobook fans young and old, none of that really matters. What does matter is the incredibly entertaining narration performed by the super-talented Rupert Degas.
I listen to a lot of audiobooks, and it takes quite a bit to get me truly excited about a narrator's performance. Degas makes the cut. Take a listen to this short clip, and keep in mind that it's one guy doing all the voices.
I actually couldn't believe it the first time I listened, but it's all Degas. His vocal range is incredible -- from 12-year-old Stephanie to sub-baritone Skulduggery and everyone in between. Say what you will about the umpteenth Harry Potter-esque plot line -- it's well enough written to be highly entertaining, and the Degas' rendition makes it an audiobook experience that should not be missed. (I also really like the spooky-jazzy incidental music at the end of each chapter -- a nice touch for fun material of this sort.)
For a more grown-up -- and far less light-hearted -- listening experience, give a listen to Degas' rendition of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, produced by Naxos Audiobooks. Degas is an Englishman by birth, but he has no trouble shifting from the Scottish locale of Skulduggery Pleasant to a completely credible American accent for McCarthy's heart-rending, suspenseful story of a man and a boy struggling to live on in a post-apocalyptic America in which everything has died, save for a few sad and dangerous people.
McCarthy's book is a meditation on love, loss, the will to live, obligation, ecology, and the essentials of morality and survival. Degas reads it with a great deal of heart, bringing to life the scared boy and his loving but increasingly desperate father. His reading might even make you cry. Not every narrator can do that.
The Naxos version is slightly abridged (about an hour shorter than the full-length version), but Degas' narration is so skillful that it's really worth a listen -- even for folks like me, for whom a post-apocalyptic "downer" isn't ordinarily the first choice in reading material.
In all, Playaway currently offers eight titles narrated by the talented Mr. Degas. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend any of them.
And you can also hear him as part of the full-cast reading of The Golden Compass, the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. More on Pullman in an upcoming post.
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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta
