★★★★☆ Metaphysical insights into The Problem

The Creeping Shadow

Jonathan Stroud

The Creeping Shadow is book 4 of 5 in Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood & Co series. In these books some unknown event about 50 years ago caused ghosts to begin appearing all over England. The ghosts are dangerous -- if they touch you you die. When I say "unknown event", I mean that as of book 4, it's still unknown. I suspect that we will find out what it was before the end of book 5. Adults can't perceive the ghosts, but children and teenagers can. (OK, yeah. That's a transparent ploy to justify a Young Adult series.) Thus we have psychic investigation agencies in which children are employed to find and get rid of the ghosts. Most of these agencies are big companies -- the two biggest being the Fittes and Rotwell agencies. But the smallest agency in London -- four employees, is Lockwood & Co. The four are Anthony Lock, George Cubbins, Holly Munro, and our first-person narrator Lucy Carlyle.

Or they were, until the end of book 3, when Lucy announced that she was going independent. Thus we begin The Creeping Shadow with Lucy working with a team of four incompetent Rotwell agents. It will come as no surprise that Lucy and the Lockwood Agency get thrown in each other's way and end up working together again in The Creeping Shadow. There are big revelations in this installment, which of course I will not spoil. The upshot is that we now have hints about the metaphysics of the ghosts troubling the world of the Lockwood & Co series. And I believe they hint that in the next and final book we are likely to learn the nature of The Problem.

I liked this installment a lot, because it shows that we're going somewhere. When I was a kid most of the entertainment on television was sitcoms. The first rule of a sitcom was "Nothing changes." The set is the same week after week, the characters are the same, and nothing that happens in any episode has permanent consequences. You could watch the reruns in any order and they'll make just the same amount of sense. (Obviously I'm exaggerating a bit.) You can see why TV producers liked this. And some book series fall into this stasis trap. (See, for example Stephanie Plum.) Aside from the economic benefits, stasis is not a great thing. Wandering around aimlessly doesn't make for great plots, and even less for character development. Modern TV, I'm happy to say, is not like that. Nowadays we expect a TV series to have a Big Story and to make progress on it most weeks.

It wasn't obvious to me in books one and two of Lockwood & Co that Stroud was going anywhere. Now it is.

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