The Screaming Staircase

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 perfect. It has a well-realized fantasy world with an insidious paranormal problem, engaging characters and real danger. The story has enough twists, surprises and scares for everyone. It's also great all-ages (10 and up?) reading - I'm giving a copy to my 23 year-old brother for the holiday. Yeah, that's a pretty whole-hearted recommendation. It IS love! Recommended for: readers ages ten and up (especially those who like mysteries), fans of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, and anyone who likes a good ghost story.

A little cliche to be fair, and I greatly dislike how it was Americanized. However, the characters are fun and the story is well paced and described. There are nit-picks on things, of course, especially around all the ChekHov's Guns that keep appearing throughout. I do wish, as this was clearly written to have following stories, that more had been saved for future books. But no, every one had to be used, which made the ending quite telegraphed and anti climactic. The world building is what stands out as the best part of the book. The clear rules of the Problem, but with facts that challenge them, especially the way it links so many global ghost stories yet only applies to England is quite a good mystery. This and the characters really are what are getting me to pick up the later volumes. If I can find a British edition that doesn't use cookies, flashlights, and Fahrenheit.

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 the number one agency in London and isn't above endangering his associates to achieve it. His deputy, George Cubbins, provides most of the comic relief in the book and is best described as the overweight, flatulent, male slob equivalent of Hermione Granger of the Harry Potter books and much like her, he approaches every problem by reading and researching the hell out of it. Reminiscent of the taxonomy of summonable spirits in the Bartimaeus books, Lockwood & Co. categorises ghosts into Type Ones to Threes, in an order of increasing intelligence, autonomy and malevolence. Within those Types are various species of spirits ranging from Cold Maidens to Poltergeists to Phantasms, and they are grouped according to their behaviour and abilities. Unlike the ghosts in Potterverse, the Visitors (as they are euphemistically called) imagined by Stroud are of the horror film variety: creepy, mindless and often violently murderous. Stroud clearly intends to scare his readers with them. Like the Bartimaeus Sequence, The Screaming Staircase is a breezy read - I finished it in a day and found myself hungering for the sequel. I could tell that Stroud already had the mytharc of the series down pat, and the grand architecture of it loomed ominously over the events of the first book. What is the Problem and what is causing it? I NEED TO KNOW! I guess I'll just have to wait for next year for the provisionally titled second book, The Whispering Skull. to be published. If George R. R. Martin manages to deliver The Winds of Winter next year as well, it would make 2014 a really good year indeed. I recommend The Screaming Staircase to just about anyone at all. It doesn't matter who you are, how old you are or that you don't even necessarily enjoy reading for leisure at all. Stroud always know how to show everyone an enchantingly good time.

I discovered Lockwood & Co. by watching the excellent series on Netflix. For me, many Netflix series aimed at young adultish fantasy readers just aren't great. They tend to rely on elements of young adult fantasy that I dislike - the heroes are perfect and often fall into the category of abusive partners, heroines are often imperfect and need to be rescued and/or unattractive (and need to be rescued). The heroine is selfless and will sacrifice herself for anything and anyone. There's also the formulaic slut shaming aimed at any other woman who even speaks to the hero. None of this is true of Lockwood & Co. The series is one I didn't want to end and I definitely want to see a second season (Netflix, we're all looking at you here). It was so good that I had to read at least one of the books. The Screaming Staircase is the first in the five-book series and yes, dear reader, I'll be reading them all (no matter what Netflix decides to do). These books are listed as either middle-grade, or young reader, or young adult. I think they're suitable for some elementary school readers and definitely suitable for adults. If you know a kid who loves Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, I think they would also love these books. We're in an alternate England, but especially London, where there is a plague of ghosts of all kinds - get touched by one and you'll soon join them. Children are the only ones who are able to combat them because they have powers that allow them to get the upper hand. They grow out of these powers, of course, but still require adult "supervision," although you learn the worth of that pretty quickly. Lockwood & Co. is a 3-person agency with no adult supervision. Lockwood, Lucy, and George are content to do their own research on their cases and to do battle to raise ghosts to rest. Of course, there are misadventures, but these just make you root for the characters even more. After a very unfortunate mishap involving Greek fire in a house that ... well, you can probably imagine ... the trio falls on hard times. There are fines to be paid and they move lose their house and their business or at a minimum come under supervision (yeah, I'm not fond of adult supervision, either). At the last moment, the owner of the most haunted house in England hires them to make the place less haunted. The world building is ingenious and is communicated through just enough exposition and events that occur in the books. Anthony Lockwood is my favorite kind of English prep school boy - you know the ones - tousled hair, handsome, deadly with a rapier, mysterious, and a true and loyal friend. George Cubbins is a researcher - a budding young scientist complete with loads of library time and some dubious experimental undertakings. Lucy Carlyle, our heroine and narrator, is tough, talented, and not afraid to speak her mind - more and more so as the book goes on. I like her a lot - so good to see a heroine who isn't a princess in need of rescue (more of this please). The book was engaging and interested and I returned to it again and again with anticipation. It was good enough that it took me awhile to find my next read and once I finished that one, I started on the second Lockwood & Co book, The Whispering Skull. Highly recommended!

Jonathan Stroud is one of my favorite children's fantasy authors, and Lockwood & Co does nothing to disappoint. His Bartimeus trilogy is one of my all-time favorite children's book fantasy series (I know this is heretical for people in my generation, but I'd rank it above Harry Potter--partially because the seventh Harry Potter retroactively tainted the series for me, partially because Bartimeus is so deliciously snarky, and mainly because of the elegance with which Stroud wraps up the third and final book), and although I was a little leery of Lockwood & Co when I first read the description ("Ghosts? Really?") I pre-ordered it and was lucky enough to receive it a day early! (It pays to live a few blocks away from one of Amazon's fulfillment centers sometimes.) I eagerly devoured the entire thing in a day, and would not be surprised if Lockwood & Co eventually turns into another of my favorite children's fantasy series (although the story wraps up beautifully, it is strongly hinted at the end of the book that there will be more to come). Ghosts may have seemed a strange choice in subject matter to me initially, but I had forgotten how well Stroud handles horror: he doesn't focus on explicitly horrific subject matter in any of his other books that I've read, but the horror scenes in Heroes of the Valley , and particularly the grave robbing scene in The Golem's Eye (second book of the Bartimeus Trilogy), are some exquisitely executed horror that should have tipped me off to the fact that Lockwood & Co is a natural place for him to end up. Much like Bartimeus did for demon summonings, Lockwood & Co takes all the stereotypical trappings of traditional ghost stories, mixes them together with young, plucky, and occasionally snarky characters, and comes up with something uniquely wonderful. London (and indeed all of England) is afflicted with the Problem: a rash of hauntings and deaths caused by supernatural means that proliferated after some unknown event about fifty years ago. Sadly, the only people able to deal with the threat are young children; those with the gift are able to detect ghostly activity, but as they age their abilities degrade. Lucy Carlyle, the heroine of Lockwood & Co, is one such gifted youngster who has joined up with the independent Lockwood & Co: a small team of children who work without adult supervision. Unfortunately, their fledgling team is less talented than its visionary founder, Anthony Lockwood, envisions and due to a series of mishaps ends up desperately accepting a highly dangerous job in one of England's most haunted houses. Lucy is a wonderful protagonist: she's smart, talented, often snarky, and a fairly sensitive soul despite the horrible things she has experienced. I would not be surprised if Lockwood & Co appeals to a larger crowd than Bartimeus initially did simply because of Lucy; Bartimeus and his master Nathaniel could both be off-putting at times, while you're rooting for Lucy from the first page onward. I highly enjoyed her compatriots, as well: Anthony Lockwood's manic-depressive charisma and skill with the rapier are subtly offset by his childish view on the world, while George Cubbins is hilariously negligent about social expectations regarding hygiene in a way that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has dealt with pubescent boys in any quantity. I am eagerly awaiting to see where Stroud goes with his little gang of miscreants and ghost hunters in future books, and for now strongly recommend that you give Lockwood & Co a try; you will certainly not regret it.

This is a fun book, something I would have absolutely gone bonkers over when I was in grade school or junior high. As an adult, it's a nice break from some of the heavier fantasy. It's also refreshing in that it focuses on action instead of romance - which is what has turned me off from a lot of the YA stuff coming out. I wanted to read about kids fighting ghosts and that's what I got. One of the things that struck me was that the story was told in first person, not from the PoV of Lockwood, but from the perspective of the group's latest recruit, a young lady by the name of Lucy Carlyle. In some ways, it reminds of a Sherlock Holmes story with Lucy taking the place of Dr. Watston, describing the escapades of the group, especially their eccentric leader Anthony Lockwood. The story leaps right into the action, detailing an exciting and completely disastrous job that nearly kills off Lucy and Lockwood straight off. It gets them into all sorts of hot water, especially financially, and provides the reason they take on a wholly nasty job that could well be beyond their abilities. I won't go into tons of detail, I don't want to ruin the adventure, but I will say there are tons of creepy and dangerous ghosts the trio (Lucy, Lockwood and George) must deal with. It's no Scooby Doo tale where the ghosts end up being fake. I like the rationale for why all of the ghost hunters are youngsters. I don't like how all of the adults are either stupid or nasty. There is too much of that in stories intended for a young audience. It's okay for the kids to be heroes without having to resort to turning all adults into the enemy. Aside from that, I found the book a real pleasure. I will be reading the next in the series.

Please understand that all my reviews focus on the interests of my middle school students. I never do a full plot synopsis in a review and try to give as little away as possible. YA literature always seems to "get things" much better than those dusty tomes for grown ups! The Ghost/spirit-monster genre is certainly no exception. You just can't beat The Last Apprentice (that's the Wardstone Chronicles for you Brits), especially if you like a stoic first-person narration, or the Monstrumologist series, although it is very, very dark. Now we have Stroud venturing into the spiritual realm again (as in the Bartimaeus series), only this time the human main character (a girl name Lucy Carlyle) is actually likable (remember, Bartimaeus, though very likable, is not human). Stroud returns to London for his setting, but it is London of the near-future, not the past. The plot's major premise is that the world (England in particular) is experiencing what the populace calls the Problem: sinister ghosts, capable of killing and inflicting serious injury both physical and mental, have started appearing all over the place. The small-letter problem is that only children and teens can see and deal with these deadly apparitions. As the kids age, they start losing their gifts to see (before they manifest), hear, feel, etc. the ghosts (called Visitors). A lot of them then become supervisors for the kids who do the real work. The gifts these children have differ in form, strength, and usefulness. Needless to say, getting rid of ghosts soon becomes a thriving industry. Agencies spring up all over the place, and, in time, of course, some garner better reputations and more clients than others. All agencies use adult supervisors to oversee the kids. It is isn't long before the government sticks its bureaucratic nose into things. Between the adult interference and government regulation, ghost-busting starts to lose its effectiveness. Enter our hero, Anthony Lockweed, who leads the Lockwood & Co. psychic detection agency. He is himself a mid-teen; he hires only other kids and loathes the restrictions of having frightened adults along on a case. There is a fly in this ointment, however, as the agency has only three employees: Anthony, the afore-mentioned Lucy, and George, a gluttonous, but brilliant, thirteen-year-old. In addition, the agency is in serious financial peril and will soon have to shut down if its fortunes don't turn. The plot centers on the kids' effort to rescue the agency by solving a high-profile and extremely dangerous case while at the same time seeing to the needs of their other clients and cases. The pace of the plot is not exactly blistering, but it is never tedious, either. You will move along quite well and smoothly. For me, the first-person narrative (by Lucy) is absolutely addictive. If you do the math from given clues, you can deduce that Lucy is around fifteen. She is spunky, decisive, a bit spontaneous (but NOT impulsive), and very adamantly independent. The narration is light and conversational and, although not as consistenly humorous as Bartimaeus, will at times have you laughing out loud. Stroud has nailed the voice of a mid-teen, feisty girl. Character development is superb, both of minor and major characters. The second book in the series is now available. If you like Delaney, Yancey, Wrede, and others like them, you will love this book/series.

What a rare treat it is to find a book so gripping that I'd want to experience it twice in one year! I hadn't heard of Jonathan Stroud or the series when its title caught my attention in the bookstore. But before I knew it, I found myself almost as 'ghostlocked' as the characters. Jonathan Stroud's writing is so vivid and atmospheric that I could practically feel the characters' fear, leaving me as cold and tense as the characters themselves. His approach to worldbuilding is a particular win here. This isn’t just another ghost story. It's a well-crafted reality. Spirits are dangerous and unpredictable but also are grounded in a clear set of rules that are expounded upon the more you read. The characters, teens in this case, have agency and skills and are not at all helpless. This structured nature of the universe doesn't lessen the fear. Instead, it heightens it. We know the risks and we sense the consequences. The knowledge only builds the suspense. The character dynamics are so well done. They all feel real in their complexity, with each bringing in their own strengths and flaws. In their collaboration and loyalty to one another, the trio really shine. You find yourself enjoying their bickering and relishing their quiet moments (perhaps with a biscuit or three to share in their feasts). The author really created characters that linger in the mind long after the final page and I am almost sad that I'm just meeting them now. All in all, I'm hooked and am reading the other books.

Although the book was written for tweens and I am much older than 12 years old, I love it! I enjoyed every page and can't wait the sequel. I crave to know what had happened to Lockwood's parents. Or if they can find the 3rd ghost(s)? What is the ghost in the bottle in Lockwood's?

Empieza un poquitín lento, poco a poco el autor te va describiendo un mundo parecido al nuestro pero que en un pasado (1950 aproximadamente) ocurre algo que de repente empiezan a ocurrir cosas paranormales pero... Con consecuencias mortales y que solo algunos niños tienen cierta sensibilidad ya sea para ver, oler o escuchar o incluso comunicarse. Esta historia está llena de aventuras y mucho suspenso, pasa lo inesperado y este libro hasta el momento es el mejor de todos el ambiente que se describe sí que era de miedo esas escaleras 😱, lo leí en inglés pero tuve algunas dificultades porque no es un inglés de Estados Unidos pero solo,es cuestión de acostumbrarte a sus expresiones a lo mejor por eso me pareció lento en un principio

After watching the Netflix Series, I had to know what happened next, so I ended up reading through the entire series. Even though I’m not the target demographic (I’m in my forties) I immensely enjoyed these stories. Original, imaginative, and highly addictive! My only complaint is that the books were clearly “Americanized”. The temperatures were all given in Fahrenheit and I’m sure some of the vocabulary was altered. I’m not sure why this version was sold to the Canadian market. Even my ten year old son noticed the inconsistencies without me having to point them out and I had to keep translating the temperatures back into Celsius for him. I think it would have been better to offer the original version to the Canadian audience.

All of them, the whole series! Wonderful! Perfect! In years I haven’t been so absorbed, so captured. I miss them already! My compliments to the author!

Jag älskade boken.