Dreadful Acts: The Eddie Dickens Trilogy Book Three

Written by Philip Ardagh

Narrated by Martin Rayner

In this eagerly awaited sequel to A House Called Awful End, Eddie Dickens narrowly avoids being blown up, trampled by horses, hit by a hot-air balloon, and arrested-only to find himself falling head over heels for a girl with a face like a camel's and into the hands of a murderous gang of escaped convicts, up on the misty moors, who have a "little job" for him to do.

All the old favorites are here-including Mad Uncle Jack and Malcolm (or is it Sally?) the stuffed stoat-along with some worrying-looking new ones. Beware!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio
• Release date: Aug 12, 2003
• ISBN: 9780807218914

Philip Ardagh

Roald Dahl Funny Prize-winning author Philip Ardagh is the author of The Grunts and National Trust: The Secret Diary series. He is probably best known for his Grubtown Tales, but he is author of over 100 books. He is a "regular irregular" reviewer of children's books for The Guardian, and is currently developing a series for television. Philip Ardagh is two metres tall with a ridiculously big, bushy beard and size sixteen feet, making him an instantly recognisable figure at literary festivals around the world.

Reviews for Dreadful Acts

[theoclarke · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An improvement on its predecessor as the persecuted Eddie escapes all manner of scrapes in a dark tale of absurdly high adventure.

[dlmorrese · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is second book of the Eddie Dickens trilogy, and it has many of the same zany characters as the first one, A House Called Awful. Like the first, the prose of this book reads almost as if it was written a century ago. The narrator actively speaks to the reader, reminding them that they are reading a book. Here is an example where he’s talking about a list of characters:
‘I’m beginning to wish that we’d had one of those lists at the beginning of this book, but what’s to say that we can’t have one over halfway through the adventure?’
He then goes on to provide one and congratulates himself for how ‘classy’ it looks. He does things like this often, explaining the meaning of words he used, asking the reader if they remember something said earlier, and providing a page number to check if they don’t, and things like that.
Modern books on writing tell us the author should avoid intruding on the story, but I find this style rather quaint and charming, at least in lighthearted books for kids. A.A. Milne did things like this often. Of course, Winnie the Pooh was published in 1926. The first American edition of Dreadful Acts was published in 2003.
This short book (128 pages) is mostly about Eddie, a fairly normal young gentleman, and his interaction with several very abnormal adults. The plot is almost secondary, so I won’t go into it much. It’s really just part of the setting, after all, but it involves escaped convicts, stolen jewels, and a failed magic trick. It’s a quick, fun read. I recommend it. I’ll get around to reading the third someday, but the only copy my local library has was checked out when I picked up the first two.