Book Title: A Small Matter of Impending Catastrophe
Author: Derek Landy
Series: Skulduggery Pleasant
Date Started: December 5ht 2025
Date Completed: December 17th 2025
Genres: Fantasy, Adventure
Quality Rating: Three Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Four Star
Final Rating: Three Stars
Review:
These audiobook/podcasts are great and I'm really pleased they're clearly doing well enough to make more of them - but they don't really translate into novels. While taking the full advantage of a sound-based medium, using music to solve puzzles and showcasing a low-vision character in strokes of genius, the charm of its performance is mostly lost in translation.
Without space for Derek's token action sequences and environmental storytelling, you end up with a lot of new information shared very quickly in these novella-style stories. I've found it harder to connect with the characters as most of their personality exists in long conversations (minus the voice acting) on the page, and the pure and simple mystery genre misses out on some of the cross-boundary flairs of the main series.
Despite my lower-than-usual rating of the book, I really do enjoy the audio productions and think the episodic podcast style works really nicely. The sound designers, directors and actors all do a fantastic job of bringing Derek's unique humour to life and I'm excited to see what new stories they'll do with it - I would love them to develop into multi-part stories with proper character arcs, as that seems to be the missing ingredient holding it back.
