"The Whispering Skull" by Jonathan Stroud

I've managed to put a lower bound on the time period in which this book is set; it's sometime during or after the 1960s. This I deduce from mentions of flip-flops and Velcro, both of which really started being things in the '60s. So I wasn't that far off in my earlier estimate.

Unlike the Screaming Staircase of the previous book, the titular skull is not actually the main spookiness of this book. That's not really a spoiler, because it's rather immediately obvious what the title is referring to; it shows up in pretty much the first scene.

[EDIT, 11/4/2025: Fixed a grammar error]

The actual main plot revolves around a Dead Guy of Extreme Spookiness, and the history surrounding him. Including |his creation of a mirror that was supposed to let people see into the afterlife but actually just kills you|. That turns out to be the actual MacGuffin of the book, thanks to its ability to |emulate the One Ring and make people wish they had it|.

I really do like the protagonist of this. She holds her own well.

This review was originally going to be published on November 9th, but it's the Halloweeniest thing I have in my posting queue right now, so I moved it up.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for scary scenes.

4 stars.

(Endnote: "psssssssst i'm eeeeeevil" -the skull) 

"The Last Battle" by C. S. Lewis

Sing it with me now: "🎵It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine...🎵"

Well, it's the end of Narnia as we know it, and I only feel fine because I'm not actually in Narnia. For the people in Narnia, it's pretty bad.

If The Magician's Nephew is the Book of Genesis, then The Last Battle is the Book of Revalation. It has all the crazy eschatology and giant monsters and things. Also there's a pretty cool description of the Narnian version of Judgment Day nearish the end.

Eustace, Jill, and the last king of Narnia are the main characters of this, though |pretty much every POV character except Susan shows up near the end|.

I don't have much to say about this; end-of-the-world fiction isn't generally my thing. If you're going to do it, it should be grand and cataclysmic and tragic, and this hits all of those beats very well. It's a fitting conclusion to the Narnia series.

I find it darkly funny whenever the bad guys declare that they serve an even bigger bad guy, but don't actually believe in it, only to discover that the even bigger bad guy actually is real.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft T for scenes of violence.

4 stars.

(Endnote: This is some of the least final end-of-the-world fiction I've ever read, because it's a Judgment Day allegory, which means it ends with |everybody going to the Narnian equivalent of Heaven|. Well, not everybody everybody, but you know what I mean.)

"Five Kingdoms" series by Brandon Mull

Five Kingdoms is a portal fantasy series centering around a boy named Cole and his adventures, some more harrowing than others, in the alternate world of the Outskirts.

 

My apologies for any defects in the above image. The Windows 11 version of MS Paint is vastly inferior to the Windows 10 version, and I haven't gotten used to it yet. 

Book 1: Sky Raiders

We don't actually spend much time with the titular Sky Raiders.

This book seemed like it was going to be serious and traumatic-for-characters and somewhat depressing, and then it... kinda wasn't. I'm not sure whether to be relieved that it's less bad for the characters, or annoyed that it set itself up to be that bad and wasn't.

There's a character in this, Mira, who the main character (named Cole) has a crush on. This is somewhat of a problem, as any actual romance between them is made really weird by the fact that Cole is thirteenish and Mira, while biologically also thirteenish, |has actually been around for like 60 years and is just magically thirteenish forever as a disguise|.

Book 2: Rogue Knight

This book starts in Kingdom 2 of 5 (Book 1 was Sambria the straightforward magic kingdom, book 2 is Elloweer the illusions and shapeshifting kingdom).

Our protagonists are starting to collect a lot of people into their entourage, and I begin to have trouble keeping them all straight. Maybe I should make myself a cheat sheet.

There's a character in this, Trillian the torivor, who is too out-of-nowhere cool not to be important later. He's a sort of ageless extradimensional being who's ridiculously magical but currently stuck in a castle after some normal (well, "normal," they were overpowered wizards fighting a gratuitously overpowered magic being) people sealed him into it. He also may be from one of Brandon Mull's other series, Beyonders, but I'm not entirely clear on that.

 

(You may, but probably won't, notice that the post image actually says The Rogue Knight on the cover of this one. I didn't notice that until I'd already pasted them all into the single image.) 

Book 3: Crystal Keepers

Welcome to Kingdom 3 of 5: Zeropolis, which has decided it's done with high fantasy and wants to be cyberpunk instead. They have Internet.

This is the first book I've ever seen where the climax involves |defeating magic Skynet by siccing a different magic Skynet on her, then blowing them both up with the fantasy equivalent of an atom bomb while they're distracted fighting each other|. Brandon Mull is highly imaginative.

I really liked the twist in this with the Hunter, a character who's been chasing the protagonists in the background since like the first book. I'm not going to describe it here, since it would require explaining like half the lore; also it's a pretty major twist that I think is going to have repercussions down the line. (I'm writing each book's individual review as I read them, so I don't actually know there'll be repercussions until I've read books 4 and 5.)

Book 4: Death Weavers

And here we are in Kingdom 4 of 5, Necronum the kingdom full of ghosts and Beyonders references.

|Cole's superpowers have now been turned back on. (He sort of got them during Rogue Knight, only for that book's big bad to promptly turn them off again.)|

Y'know how I mentioned Trillian? He hasn't been really important yet, but |there's another torivor who is. He's the bad guy of this book, mostly. His name is Nazeem, but I kept forgetting that, so I just called him Craig for most of the book|.

 

Some characters from Beyonders, one of Brandon Mull's other series, show up in this as ghosts. I suspect their inclusion would be a lot cooler to people who've actually read the series they're from.

 

I think this is the first book where Cole spends a significant portion of the story separated from his giant ever-growing friend group. It was nice to see how he fares on his own for a bit when all his random friends aren't there.

Book 5: Time Jumpers

Kingdom 5 of 5 is Creon, where they screw around with spacetime. They also use a lot of crayons.

A time jumper is not an article of clothing. It's someone who does the "time" part of the screwing around with spacetime.

We have the final bossfight in this one, |against Craig Nazeem|, and |Trillian gets to finally be relevant|. I do have a bit of a quibble, in that their original plan for defeating the final boss was hyped up to be the only way they could think of to defeat it... |and then the final boss catches on to it, so they just randomly improvise another one? One that the final boss's supposed overpowered-magic-ness should have let him escape almost instantly? I'm not entirely sure what Brandon Mull was thinking when he wrote this|.

Overall Notes

I think the series sort of lost its direction toward the end. It's like Brandon Mull realized that |he'd set up the High King in such a way that he'd be an absolute pushover as a final boss|, so he decided to just |sidestep that whole plot and [ENDING SPOILERS] start a new one based around the High King's evil grand vizier, the grand vizier's torivor master Nazeem/Ramarro/Craig, and their whole evil metamagician cult|. So it went from |"let's stop the king and his minions from recapturing his coughMacGuffincough daughters, who we're already invested in because they're characters we know, and save the world from tyranny"| to |"let's stop the grand vizier and the torivor and both their minions from releasing the torivor, who just recently became relavant midway through book 4, and save the world from destruction"|. And the second one would have been a perfectly serviceable plot, if it had been there from the beginning.

I do like the inclusion of the |"shapecrafters" in this universe; basically, the normal magic (or "shaping," which does somewhat trigger the Renamed Concept Rule) changes the real world, and shapecraft is a sort of meta-magic that changes the normal magic|. That's not something I've seen a lot of things do. (In the first few books, it was still somewhat of a mystery. So I theorized the existence of what I called |"shapecraftcraft", or meta-meta-magic, which was magic that changed the magic that changed the magic|. This was mostly a joke.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for fantasy violence and some scary scenes. It could actually be a reasonably good action-adventure videogame; the quests are questy enough, and it has things that could be bosses.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "I'm not running because I'm guilty. I'm running because you're chasing me."

    Page 46, Rogue Knight

    Ingredients: Camels, microscopes, yams, hydrogen, coral reefs, mannequins, poems, comets, mousetraps, sarcasm, cacti, labyrinths; contains less than 2% uranium, cyanide, cobwebs, magma, polio

    Page 111, Crystal Keepers. It's the ingredients list for a candy bar. 

(Endnote: I shall now assemble the Kingdoms, the Worlds, the Nights at Freddy's, and the Guys to create the ultimate crossover series. Stay tuned.)

"The Magician's Nephew" by C. S. Lewis

Behold, it's the Creation story of the world of Narnia.

I was always oddly fascinated by Charn and the Deplorable Word. Jadis herself is just okay as a character (I'm kind of used to her existence thanks to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), but I always get the sense that there's so much more going on with Charn that we just don't see.

The big bad of The Silver Chair is described by some owls as being "some of the same crew" as the White Witch. It's never really elaborated as to what that means, but with the reveal of the White Witch as former Deplorable-Word-using empress of Charn with no living relatives, that doesn't make much sense; the Deplorable Word killed everyone except Jadis in her entire universe, so how could the Lady of the Green Kirtle be the same kind of thing?

One theory is that she's just Jadis reincarnated, but I don't hold to that theory, because I don't think Lewis would trivialize the White Witch's defeat in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by bringing her back, only for her to be defeated again without Aslan's direct help. My theory is that she's either A) a former apprentice of the White Witch, explaining the "crew" remark because they would have worked together for a time, or B) the same sort of thing as Jadis (i.e. a powerful evil sorceress from another dimension), just not from Charn.

This book is the best argument against reading Narnia in the chronological order, because it's not a very start-of-series kind of book. Honestly, until you've read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe through at least The Horse and His Boy, it doesn't make much sense. I didn't, and it actually put me off the rest of Narnia for a while when I first tried the series years ago.

[EDIT: I forgot to mention that I really liked how this explains why there's a random lamppost in the middle of a forest in Narnia for Lucy to encounter in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.]

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. It would be pretty hard to make this into a videogame that holds onto your attention for any length of time; the main characters are there as observers for much of the story.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I missed another day in my posting schedule. Oh, the horror.)

"The Silver Chair" by C. S. Lewis

If you assemble the Silver Chair, the Bronze Bow, and the Golden Compass, the ultimate power will be yours: Platinum, Alaska.

(I'm joking. Platinum, Alaska is actually a real town, though; as of 2020, it was inhabited by a whopping 55 people.)

For being the book's namesake, the Silver Chair is actually not in very much of the book. It appears in like one scene.

This book introduces Jill Pole, who's also in The Last Battle. I think she's the first female character to have POV for a majority of a book; there were bits from Susan's, Lucy's, and Aravis's POVs in the others, but it was mostly the guys.

Does anybody know if C. S. Lewis ever said what happens if you dig to the bottom of Narnia? We know from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader that it's flat, but to the best of my knowledge nothing ever says how far down it goes. There's the Land of Bism mentioned here, which is supposedly the underground of the underground, but what if they went down further? Would they find even more underground kingdoms--is it underground kingdoms all the way down? Does it eventually just start being infinite solid rock? Do you fall out the bottom if you go too far? Does Aslan show up and tell you to knock it off?

I don't know, and I don't know if anybody else does, either.

This was one of my least favorite Narnia books when I was younger. I think that's partially because it's relatively unlike the others in both plot and tone, partially because it's harder than the others to take as a single narrative, and partially my own fault.

Basically, a short way into the book, I decided I wanted to know how it was going to end, so I flipped to the last page and read that. Except if you don't have the context from the rest of the book, the last page will make approximately zero sense, and I got very confused. That sense of confusion then lasted for pretty much my entire initial readthrough.

(The moral of the story: don't read the last page first, it won't make any sense.)

I think this is one of the most mature of the Narnia books. There's not any inappropriate content or anything, but it just has older vibes. I don't know if anyone else gets that out of it, but I do.

Oh, and I should mention Puddleglum! He's extremely dour, but also hilarious, and he's one of my favorite characters.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence and some child abuse. It could be a reasonably good videogame in sort of the style of the newer Zelda releases.

4 stars.

(Endnote: This has a lot of allegorical-ish elements, but I can't for the life of me figure out whether it is one, and if so, what for.)

"The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexandre Dumas (adaptation by Crystal S. Chan, art by Nokman Poon)

In a manga or graphic novel, the art is at least as important to me as the story in determining how much I like it. If a graphic novel has a great story but the art is hideous, I'm probably not going to like it; conversely, if the story is lame but the art is good, I'll usually finish reading it just for the art.

The art in this is great, as is the story.

I don't really have much to say about the plot, because it's just the plot of The Count of Monte Cristo. They stayed very true to it, and it's honestly pretty incredible how well they managed to condense such an absolute brick of a book into this manga.

(Side note: I love how dramatic men's formal wear can look, especially the 1800s-era-ish kind. This manga makes good use of it.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for murder and the like, as well as some delicately handled plot points involving illegitimate children.

4 stars.

(Endnote: At one point, the Count says that he's going to return someone's glove "wrapped around a bullet" [i.e. he's going to shoot him]. |The duel ends up not happening|, so I think it would be funny if |some time later he wrapped the glove around a bullet and gave it back to its original owner|.)

"The Horse and His Boy" by C. S. Lewis

This review is part of my first completed quest, although I'm not entirely sure why.

Basically, the puzzle that started it all has two of the Narnia books on it: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Horse and His Boy. Why whoever assembled it picked those two out of the list, I don't know. (Although, if I were assembling that puzzle and had to pick two Narnia books, I'd probably pick either this or Prince Caspian for the second one.)

This is the one set in Calormen. Now I can stop mentioning it every review.

Basically, a Calormene slave boy (named Shasta, who's actually from some nebulous somewhere else; he's not Calormene by birth) meets a talking horse from Narnia and decides to run away to Narnia rather than get sold to a jerkface. Along the way, he meets a Calormene noble girl (named Aravis) and her talking horse from Narnia, who's also currently running away to Narnia. So they run away to Narnia.

Along the way, Shasta runs into some of the Pevensies, and Aravis runs into the absolute ditziest character I think I've ever seen in fiction: Lasaraleen Tarkheena, who's somewhat irritating but also hilarious. Then they find out that |the Calormene prince Radabash is going to sneak attack Narnia and Archenland because he has a crush on Susan who doesn't like him back (because he's a total jerk), and they rush to get there before the invading army so they can warn everyone about it|.

Oh, and |Shasta is actually a long-lost prince of Archenland|.

I'm not entirely sure how old anyone is in this, but I don't think they're twelve.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. I think it could be quite a good videogame, actually; it has a mostly linear plot and a clear sense of direction, which lends itself to a linear videogame (thus removing the problem I've seen with making less linear books into imaginary videogames: the dilemma of either "railroad the player into retracing the steps the original protagonist took through the story" or "make it truly open-world, necessitating making up a bunch of stuff that wasn't in the book to fill out the game.") Honestly, this book would probably make a better videogame than most of the ones I've reviewed recently.

5 stars. This is probably the Narnia book I've read the most often, and I really do like it.

Favorite lines:

    People who know a lot of the same things can hardly help talking about them.

    Page 44.

    "I say, is there anything to drink?"

    "No, I drank it," said Shasta.

    Page 80. This is Prince Cor of Archenland returning to the apartments housing the Narnians, after a long day of getting into fights and having Shasta mistaken for him. (Hence why Shasta is also there; the Pevensies picked him up thinking he was Cor.)

    "And anyone I catch talking about this young lady will be first beaten to death and then burned alive and after that be kept on bread and water for six weeks. There."

    Page 99. This is Lasaraleen, the total ditz character I mentioned earlier, threatening her servants into not revealing Aravis's escape.

    "Beware! Beware! Beware! The bolt of Tash falls from above!"

    "Does it ever get caught on a hook halfway?" asked Corin.

    Pages 215-216. (For context, Rabadash, who's saying this, is threatening everyone with the bolt of Tash. Which falls from above. He also, in the preceding battle, tried to jump down on someone and ended up getting his chainmail shirt stuck on a hook, leaving him hanging there looking silly and yelling at everyone.)

    Aravis and Cor prepared themselves to be bored.

    Page 221. I laughed so hard over that phrasing.

(Endnote: I have taken a few artistic liberties with the punctuation of the favorite lines. This is for readability and so I can truncate the line into the actual favorite part, rather than having the favorite bit and then everything around it.)

"The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" by C. S. Lewis

The one where everyone's on a ship. 

 

Also the one to introduce Eustace Clarence Scrubb, Candidate for Governor the annoying kid who does eventually get better.

 

And the first one without Peter and Susan in it.

 

And the one where it turns out that Aslan isn't just an allegory for Jesus, he is Jesus. 

 

I thought it was a neat little detail that when they find a mysterious magic feast, the one to caution against eating it is none other than Edmund. Which actually makes a lot of sense when you consider his role in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

 

I honestly don't have much to say about this one. It does some more worldbuilding, we find out more about Calormen (which Lewis first invented as just a random mention in Prince Caspian), there's lore introduced... good stuff, but I can't really turn all that somewhat piecemeal plot into a review without delving deep into the infinite possibilities of minutae. And I don't have the energy to do that right now.

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+, like the others, for fantasy violence and for part of the plot involving slavery.

4 stars.

(Endnote: The Dawn Treader, being a ship whose name should get italicized, causes me some existential confusion when its name is nested inside a book title--which should also get italicized.)

"Prince Caspian" by C. S. Lewis

Behold, book 2 of the Chronicles of Narnia, no matter what number it says on the cover.

Now that I'm doing the whole series, I should probably explain the thing about the reading order. Basically, there are two different schools of thought regarding the proper order to read the Narnia books in, and they are a matter of some debate.

The one most collections use is the internal chronological order, namely "The Magician's Nephew / The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe / The Horse and His Boy / Prince Caspian / The Voyage of the Dawn Treader / The Silver Chair / The Last Battle." There are several problems with that one, most notably that if you haven't read any of the other books, The Magician's Nephew is hard to understand and kind of boring.

The other one is the publication order, which goes in "2 4 5 3 6 1 7" or "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe / Prince Caspian / The Voyage of the Dawn Treader / The Horse and His Boy / The Silver Chair / The Magician's Nephew / The Last Battle." That's the order people following the books for the first time would have read them in, it's the order in which Lewis wrote them, and while it doesn't get rid of the continuity errors it makes them less jarring. This one is the order I personally prefer, and the one I'll be doing this review series in.

(Wait, I just ended a sentence with a preposition! *cue screams of horror*)

Anyway, enough minutae. Time to talk about the actual book.

I'm not sure it's actually an allegory, unlike the first one. If you have any idea what (if anything) it's supposed to be allegorizing, please let me know, because I don't.

Here we are introduced to the Telmarines, who weren't originally in Narnia. They're actually pirates who came through a portal to Narnia "a long time ago", and yet somehow arrived in the 1300ish years between the first book and this one... time in Narnia is weird, man. We also have our first mention of the country of Calormen, which won't properly show up until The Horse and His Boy.

There's a bit in this where some side characters show up and attempt to summon the White Witch to get rid of the evil king. The character who introduces them uses the logic of "any port in a storm and we're losing pretty bad right now, plus she might not have been as bad as the legends make her out to be, right?", while the characters doing the summoning use the logic of "haha we're evil." They get smacked down pretty much instantly in the book, but in the movie version they partially succeed; I mostly mentioned this so I could point out how good a job the special effects people did at making that scene look intrinsically wrong.

You can see Lewis fleshing out the lore as you get farther along in the series.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. There actually was a videogame of the movie of the book; it was rated T and apparently wasn't very good. I think it could be possible to make a good videogame of this, though I'm not sure who you'd play as (maybe a Lego The Hobbit-like system of swapping between characters?) and a fairly significant chunk of the book would probably have to be reduced to cutscenes.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Certainly, Lu. Whatever you like," said Peter unexpectedly. This was encouraging, but as Peter instantly rolled round and went to sleep again it wasn't much use.

    Page 144.

(Endnote: I can neither confirm nor deny that the title character is named after the Caspian Sea. Nothing I can find has a definitive answer.)

"The Invention of Hugo Cabret" by Brian Selznick

It's not often you get jumpscared by a book, but there you are.

(Spoilers in the body of this post.)

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is about a boy who lives in a railway station in Paris, from which he scrounges (i.e. steals) gears and things to try to repair a clockwork automaton in the attic, using only some detailed drawings his now-deceased dad made to guide him. He's pretty sure it's supposed to write out a secret message or a treasure map or something, if he can only get it to work.

And after some time of fixing it and meeting people, he finally |gets it to work, and... it draws random squiggles|.

Except |it's not, really|.

It's |drawing a picture|, and when you turn the page after the characters realize it, you see a charcoal-esque representation of this MAJORLY SPOILERIFFIC image.

Which immediately alters your perceptions of what the book is about, if you know the context behind it. Like I did, having osmosed it from I know not where.

The pseudo jumpscare only really works because this book has an unusual format: much of the plot is carried by the lavish, sketch-like charcoal illustrations. In fact, probably the majority of the book's space is taken up by them. This is appropriate for a book whose subject matter |early filmmaking as a storytelling medium|, and it makes the story more impactful because you sort of have to work to get it out of the wordless pictures.

(It's less of "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" and more of "The Thing Hugo Cabret Found And Fixed Up," really. |Until you get to the very end and discover that in-universe, the entire book was written and drawn by an automaton Hugo Cabret built to write and draw the entire book. Presumably that's the titular invention.|)

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for some mild violence, chase scenes, and that jumpscare.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I'm not actually sure if it's pronounced "Cab-rhett" or "Cab-ray.")