#i got a new cellphone midway through compiling photos for this post and my god you can really tell

[indelen]

Alright, I'm hideously behind and the world is awful so I’m just going to blitz through to the end because the next readthrough is starting soon and I'm not even done with this one, like what is this, high school English? So ....

This is my reread of the Lockwood and Co. Books, organized by @blue-boxes-magic-and-tea, I'll make a general summary of several chapters and then post bits and pieces that jumped out at me.

I go into a longer analysis of Fairfax and Annie’s relationship and how it relates to Lucy but I do want to say kudos to Stroud for portraying such a realistic unhealthy relationship. This is a young adult book and he could have easily made Annabel Ward a saintly abuse victim, but she wasn’t. She was in a complicated toxic relationship with a powerful man, she feared him but wanted his love and approval, she acted in ways that provoked him, which obviously was not smart but abused people do not act in relatable, logical ways. Abuse victims fight back, act in toxic ways, return to their abusers and do any number of seemingly illogical things and I think that it says a lot about Lucy that despite all her baggage, her young age, her “not like other girls” tendencies, her inability to relate to the life Annie had, she still felt an enormous amount of empathy for her and it was that empathy that saved them in the end.

Part IV, Chapters 23-24:

Lucy’s family and her past in Cheviot Hills is fascinating because she never speaks about them except for the very succinct and detached way at the very start and these small moments throughout the books that indicate they mean a lot more to her than she would ever admit to anyone. The fact that she keeps some kind of memory box far under her bed, the fact that she sees her sisters as concussed visions alongside Annie Ward and Lockwood who, for very different reasons, currently occupy her mind quite a bit, shows the family she left behind still has a huge hold over her.

I love George so much because he sasses and analyzes everything in front of him from literally the moment he regains consciousness.

Never going to be normal about Lucy using this sort of imagery about Lockwood. She’s reaching near Victorian levels of Beautiful Death prose. Lockwood is always ethereal, otherworldly and doomed. Too good and beautiful for this sinful earth. What’s interesting is that in literature this sort of imagery is usually reserved for the hero describing the heroine. It’s one of many times the “hero” and “heroine” tropes between these two that are pretty regularly subverted.

Fairfax is like Combe Carey Hall itself in that at night he transforms and the posh and valuable facade recedes to reveal a grotesque and horrible true nature underneath.

Fairfax is an abuser who cannot understand that his toxic relationship with Annie is entirely of his own making. From the beginning their relationship was not that of equals. He was of a higher social class than her and never did anything to bridge that gap because it would threaten his precious inheritance and he never viewed acting or this part of his life as permanent or worth preserving. He was just partying and having fun before he settled into living a rich man’s life. He hid his relationship with Annabel and Annabel, naturally, resented the shit out of being treated as someone’s dirty secret. She sensed how disposable she was to him and got jealous, manufactured conflict and fights, flirted with other men, all to get attention and to provoke a reaction from Fairfax. And he rewarded her for this behavior. He was obviously controlling and his lavish gifts were meant to pacify her. They also normalized their unhealthy dynamic, the locket explicitly referred to the toxicity of their relationship as romantic. You can’t write “my torment, my bliss” on a jeweled locket and give it to a girl and then be surprised when she kinda thinks you’re ok with the torment bit. And so round and round it went until … frankly I’m not even sure that one fight was any worse than all the others. Fairfax never saw Annie as a person, he saw her as beneath him, and disposed of her, out of possessiveness and anger sure, but also out of pragmatic convenience. As long as Annie lived she was a liability and posed a risk to his reputation and name. He can try and pitch their relationship as mutually toxic and harmful all he wants but the truth is only Annie was ever in danger in it.

And here is where I put my tinfoil hat on.

Because my theory is that Annabel Ward was drawn to Lucy and formed such an empathetic bond with her specifically because she saw Lucy as being in the same situation as her. Ghosts seem to have limited capacities and see things on a loop and devoid of context. To Annabel’s spirit the story of meeting a dashing young man through work, work both are passionate about and work that brings them intimately closer together, but he is of higher social class and is financially better off and also he holds a significant amount of power over her is, on paper, very similar. Lucy might not think Annabel is much like her, but Annabel’s ghost sees things in Lucy’s mind she recognizes. Her hidden emotions, the desperate besotted love she feels for a magnetic, powerful person in her life and the feeling of inadequacy and desire to be seen as good, as valuable to him are all familiar ones Annie latches onto. And while Lucy is too young and repressed and traumatized to recognize any of this, I think she still learns a lot from Annie. It’s not a coincidence that the biggest conflict between Lockwood and Lucy is that of inequality and disbalance of power. Lucy, from this point onward, will grow to dislike that Lockwood does not share anything with her emotionally and that he overrules or does not consult her opinions professionally. And to some extent I think it’s her learning from poor Annie Ward.

Yea OK this is where I have trouble buying the “killed instantly” story Fairfax tells to everyone including himself. The human neck is not made of LEGO bricks and it’s hard to kill a fully grown adult with a single blow. So unfortunately, and this is NOT A NICE MENTAL IMAGE so like, skip to the next point if you don’t want to read something that describes grievous bodily harm, abuse and murder, but unfortunately it’s very possible Fairfax very badly injured Annie but she did not die instantly. Like, he may have broken her spine, but while that would inacapitate her, it would not necessarily kill her. If this is true then she died a much slower and more terrible death. And a few things in the above section support this. Annie repeating she’s “cold” but not understanding why. The manifestation of sounds and how they overlap - the hammering that entombed her, tapping of a finger on plaster, the slowing beating of a heart. Did Annie die on some level aware that her lover was disposing of her even before her last breath? Ghostlock was not enough. She should have eaten him.

Very early on we get these hints of just how much of a capitalist nightmare Fittes is and how it slowly swallows up smaller agencies and clearly aims to become a monopoly and discards kids they have no use for. And also how many of those kids clearly fall through the cracks and end up in criminal organizations or doing the dirty work of wealthy unscrupulous magnates.

Book Lockwood is pretty violent in these low key, concentrated and brutally efficient bursts and it’s one of those things that remains enigmatically unexplained. It’s not just fencing too, it’s all sorts of stuff. In the next book he folds Ned Shaw like a tablecloth. Did Gravedigger Sykes teach him? Flo? Unexplained! Very hot though. You 100% can see where Lucy is coming from.

Smile counter is still at 9 since there was nothing much to grin at in these chapters, but I want to give a shout-out to George for chasing after Percy, a grown man armed with a gun remember, alongside Lockwood. Like that's good guts, George doesn't like action, he doesn't live for it like Lockwood does, but he doesn't shrink away from it either.