#256.  LOCKWOOD & CO.   Booksellers these days face the oft-repeated question from kids and parents: they’ve finished the Harry Potter stories, and they want to know what to read next.  Lord knows I’m open to suggestion—Diana Wynne Jones, certainly; Madeleine L’Engle, maybe, if they haven’t read them already?—but I was just put onto the Lockwood & Co. stories by Jonathan Stroud, which might just do the trick.  The notion here is that London has been hit with a decades-long wave of malevolent and violent hauntings, to the point where people are shutting down their lives, rather as they did during the pandemic (the books preceded the arrival of Covid, but only by a couple of years).  Stroud gives us a highly amusing catalogue of these ghostly beings: changers, shades, cold maidens, wraiths, all studiously rated by the severity of their attacks, and which can only be perceived by children and adolescents; the ability to see them fades with adulthood.  This little touch gives a kind of plausibility to the most sensitive of the young people having been drafted into semi-professional status as protective agents; and it places, implicitly, the beam of heartbreak under the stories, as the children are all soon going to come to the end of their abilities.  One character, Kilp, is at first seen as antagonistic and arrogant; it’s because he’s a bit older and feels the loss coming on, which also makes him more at risk during the confrontations.  It’s the same fate ahead for all of them, if they make it that far.

       Lucy Carlyle is a northern girl of fourteen who’s thrown into this service by a mother who needs her salary.  Lucy hasn’t quite made her necromantic O-levels, and, heading alone off to London, is refused by the more posh agencies and ends up at 35 Portland Row, W1, at Lockwood & Co., where you go if you can’t afford the more official kinds of help.  Anthony Lockwood, a fifteen-year-old with a “nice, lopsided grin” and a smooth line of gab, is the boss; the “Co.” is George Cubbins, a slobby kid with a put-upon air and an ample avoirdupois.  There are no supervising adults to be seen, and Stroud has a fine time commenting on the company’s attempts at housekeeping; he also has great fun providing them with tempers, confusions, uncertain affections, great dashes of courage, a lively crowd of helpmates and enemies, and dialogue that would be the green-faced envy of most real-life adolescents.  The three are learning their way; their first recorded adventure ends up with them accidentally burning down their client’s house, which needless to say puts them a bit behind the professional eight-ball.  It also provides them with clues which, over five books, put them onto the track of the source of all this ghostly commotion, trailing back over fifty years to the beginning of what’s come to be called The Problem.  All told, the five books together are well-shaped, well-paced, with real invention, real imagination, and a satisfying emotional shape.  Lucy, in joining Lockwood & Co., finds her place and comes into a kind of makeshift family; and Lockwood, so formal and enigmatic at first, and so much the subject of Lucy’s curiosity, gets himself disentangled from a painful past.  We root for the protagonists, because they’re not just facing London’s ghosts, but their own.  At one point, Lucy and a supposed rival, while investigating a haunted department store, begin to go at each other; the poltergeists pick up on this, things start flying, the mayhem escalates, the store’s carefully described displays get smashed to bits, and everything goes explosively, comically to hell.  It’s frightening, touching and funny, because it all connects.  You’re fourteen, some girl’s poaching the boy you like, and the undead rear up and pulverize a department store.  Isn’t that just the way?

Lockwood & Co.:  The Screaming Staircase, The Whispering Skull, The Hollow Boy, The Creeping Shadow, The Empty Grave.  Little , Brown & Co, 2013-2017.