Quotes from book

The Screaming Staircase

The Screaming Staircase is a middle grade thriller novel by Jonathan Stroud. It is the first book in a series titled Lockwood & Co., and was released on 29 August 2013 by Random House in the United Kingdom, and by Disney-Hyperion in the United States on 17 September 2013.The story is set in an alternate modern day London which experiences an event called "the Problem", where ghosts appear throughout the city by nighttime and attack the living. Agencies have arisen to fend off the ghosts and protect the public, for a fee, but put themselves in extreme danger in the process. However, only children and teenagers have the "talent" to sense the ghosts; they gradually lose this once they reach their twenties. And so the agencies under with the leadership of people who have passed their ghost-sensitive ages and with the youth whose talents are instrumental in solving a haunting. All of the agencies but one. That one exception is Lockwood & Co.