The Merchant of Death

The Merchant of Death is a fantasy novel for younger readers by the American writer D. J. MacHale, published in 2002 by Aladdin Paperbacks and the first of the Pendragon series.

Bobby Pendragon is fourteen, with a family, a house and a dog named Marley, and he is in the middle of an ordinary life when his uncle Press turns up and tells him something extraordinary: that he is going to have to save the world, and not only the world he knows. Before he can argue, Bobby is taken through a flume to Denduron, a territory of strange beings ruled by a tyrant who works through magic and plagued by a frightened population that is closer to revolt than it knows. The book is framed as Bobby's own account, written down and sent back through the flumes to his friends Mark Dimond and Courtney Chetwynde, who read each instalment after the fact and try to work out what they can do from where they are.

The series follows the same pattern across ten volumes, each moving Bobby from one territory to the next.