The Screaming Staircase (Lockwood & Co., 1)

There are times when you need to sit with a book for a while after finishing it to process your feelings and reactions. Maybe the reading experience was emotionally exhausting. Maybe the subject matter was disturbing (or nightmare-inducing!). Maybe... a lot of things. After I finished Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase, I struggled to evaluate my reaction. My roommate walked in and saw me sitting on the couch, book closed on my lap, staring into space. I told her, "It was a good book, but creepy as hell." She said, "Put that in the review." Great advice. Lucy is a girl with: an exceptional ability to listen to ghosts, bad mistakes in her past, and a tendency toward obsessive preparedness. She's also an agent at London-based Lockwood & Co., a small outfit whose job it is to banish spirits. To do her work Lucy abides by three rules: 1) Get in quick, 2) Don't use electricity, and 3) Wear a watch with a luminous dial. The other (unspoken) rule is that things never go quite as expected. Increased hauntings are plaguing Britain, and only the young can detect and eliminate them. Which is how/why three teenagers came to run a business of a sinister nature. In this first in a new paranormal series, Stroud introduces three young ghost hunters: the narrator Lucy, Anthony Lockwood and George. Lucy is new and trying to prove her competence. George is abrasive and fanatical about jelly doughnuts and research. Lockwood brings them together as a clever and charismatic leader. And Stroud unites their disparate talents and abilities to tell a dark and disturbing tale for middle grade readers. Oh, it's also funny, smart and can't-put-it-down-addictive reading. If you like mystery,danger, and stories that involve escaping by the skin of your teeth, this is the book for you. Did I love it? I had a hard time knowing for the first few days. It scared the freaking daylights out of me in parts, but I couldn't stop reading. I loved Lucy and George and Lockwood, and I will be counting down the days until the next book releases and I can find out what happens next. I thought the mystery was extremely well-executed, with twists you could see coming, and others you couldn't. In some ways, I was intrigued in spite of myself, because I say I don't like scary books. And yet. I couldn't stop thinking about The Screaming Staircase. I think this is what being in love with a complex book looks like, folks. Yes, I think it must be love. Because while the story offers all the thrills and chills expected of a good ghost story, it's also about three characters who have the odds stacked against them and still rely on their ingenuity (and luck!), and let their stubborn will and intuition guide them through. That sort of pluck will win me over any day. Let me be clear: The Screaming Staircase is close to ...

One of my favourite children and young adult writers working today is Jonathan Stroud who gave life to what is possibly the funniest djinni ever birthed in fiction (sorry, Robin Williams). This is not the first time I have heaped love onto the Bartimaeus sequence of books and if you haven't read them - well, what are you waiting for? While the titular indentured djinni is certainly the most memorable element of the Bartimaeus books, what really sold the original trilogy is Stroud's vision of a dystopian London run by scheming magician-politicians who enslave spirits and tyrannises non-magic commoners. Bartimaeus' London is simultaneously familiar yet coloured in every way imaginable by its magocratic upper class. There were high end shops in Piccadilly that supply sorcerous artifacts to London's elites. The British Museum contains magical antiques (stolen from foreign cultures, much like the real British Museum) and the mummified remains of Bartimaeus' former employers. Tombs of Britain's most famous sons and daughters in Westminster Abbey are cursed and guarded by powerful spirits to discourage looters. Stroud's immense talent at world-building - or world-tweaking, really - also permeates every pen-stroke in The Screaming Staircase where he introduces us to yet another vision of London slightly askew. Lockwood & Co. is one of Britain's many enterprising agencies that had sprung up in the wake of the Problem - which is a typically English way of understating an epidemic of ghosts and hauntings spreading all across the British Isles. Suddenly, the spirits of the dead refuse to stay dead, and some categories of these spooks can hurt or even kill the living, either directly or otherwise. Employing children and teenagers with the psychic ability to sense ghosts, these agencies provide the increasingly valuable service of dealing with hauntings to the public. Stroud then layered this basic premise with commonsensical extensions of the concept by also introducing us to the corporate rivalry between these agencies, governmental offices which regulate them and perform research into psychic phenomena, and the economical microverse that revolves around ghostbusting like the iron and silver industries, lavender horticulturists and purveyors of good tea bags (preferentially by the Pitkin Brothers of Bond Street). If anything, Stroud had gotten much better at reimagining London since Bartimaeus. The Screaming Staircase is narrated by Lucy Carlyle, a young agent of exceptional talent who joined Lockwood & Co., an agency operating completely without adult supervision. Anthony Lockwood runs it, in Sherlockian fashion, from his residence at Number 35, Portland Street and through the course of The Screaming Staircase, proved to be an able understudy of the Baker Street sleuth. Anthony Lockwood intends to elevate Lockwood & Co. to be ...

I am well past the age of this book’s target audience, and enjoyed it tremendously! Stroud does excellent world building in this novel, his characters are well drawn, and they are heroic without seeming infallible.

What a fun read! Stroud did an excellent job of setting up several mysterious and then neatly wrapping wrapping up in a satisfying manner. The three main characters have really great personality and chemistry. I love the set up for Lucy’s character and talent, and how it affected the rest of the plot in subtle and major ways. The lead up with the skull/ghost on the jar was also delightful. It all left me wanting to find out more about the warning it gave, as well as what else the DEPRAC is hiding

I absolutely loved reading these books. They are well written, and immediately immerses you into their world. I finished the entire series in a week, that's how good they are!