The Screaming Staircase
core novel 2013 Lockwood & Co
Record
| First published | 2013 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.25 (78,462 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| Page count | 440 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781423164913 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
London is gripped by the Problem, a decades-long plague of dangerous ghosts that rise after dark, and only the young retain the psychic senses needed to detect and destroy them before the gift fades in adulthood. Adult-run detection agencies employ these gifted teenagers as field agents, but Lockwood & Co. is unusual: a tiny, independent outfit run entirely by young people, led by the charismatic Anthony Lockwood alongside the bookish George Cubbins. Lucy Carlyle, newly arrived in London with unusually strong psychic abilities, joins the pair and is quickly drawn into their haphazard casework. After a disastrous job leaves a client's house in ashes, the fledgling agency risks being shut down by the authorities overseeing psychic investigation unless it proves its worth, pushing the trio toward an assignment far beyond anything they have attempted, uncovering deeper truths behind the ghosts and the Problem itself.
Where it sits
- Universe: Lockwood & Co
- Series: Lockwood & Co core; position 1 of 5 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Jonathan Stroud
Awards (verified)
- Edgar Award (Best Juvenile Mystery), 2014: won
Notes
- From the series record (Lockwood & Co): A completed 5-book YA supernatural-fantasy sequence, separate from Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus Sequence, following a small London ghost-hunting agency during a decades-long haunting epidemic.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series Lockwood & Co: position 1 of 5: next The Whispering Skull (2014)
Sources
← Lockwood & Co dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.