The cult leader in Jonathan Stroud’s Whispering Skull

I find Jonathan Stroud’s Lockwood & Co. series well worth reading for the stories alone. Material that inspires commentary is a bonus! 

The article about Stroud's predatory ghosts does not cover everything of interest and relevance in the Lockwood books. There is some material that makes me think of cults, and there are people and other entities who use supernatural powers to make themselves appear to be angels when they are really demons.

This article has something to say about a sinister doctor called Edmund Bickerstaff, who is of particular interest because he has some of the characteristics that are often found in cult leaders.

The sinister Victorian doctor
Dr. Edmund Bickerstaff is a character in The Whispering Skull, the second book in the Lockwood series. He was involved with occult research and experimentation; he pursued forbidden knowledge. After years of unwholesome activities such as grave robbing and necromancy, he was believed to have come to a horrible end in 1877. The fate of his remains was unknown until the present day, when his gravestone is unexpectedly found in London's Kensal Green Cemetery.

Dr. Bickerstaff's ghost is likely to be very dangerous, so Anthony Lockwood and his fellow psychical investigation agents George Cubbins and Lucy Carlyle are retained to supervise the excavation of the grave and deal with the remains. 

Their discoveries and adventures while on the case make fascinating reading, but it is the effect that Dr. Bickerstaff has on people that is most relevant here. 

Dr. Bickerstaff and cult leaders
Cult leaders often promise everything and deliver little or nothing. They can be pied pipers who lead their sleep-walking, spellbound followers to disaster; they can be sirens who lure people to their doom. Dr. Bickerstaff is one such leader. He operated on a relatively small scale when alive, but had a lethal effect on his followers.

A few words about some fictional elves and ghosts

There are a few similarities between the elves in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books and the ghosts in fantasy writer Jonathan Stroud’s wonderful Lockwood & Co. series.

Terry Pratchett’s elves have no redeeming qualities; they are vicious, cruel, malevolent and dangerous to humans. I have quoted some of the things that he says about them in an article featuring energy vampires .

Jonathan Stroud says similar things about his ghosts. They are malevolent and dangerous to the living. There is nothing good to say about them.

Terry Pratchett’s elves enter the world through gaps in the defences, through what could be described as weak points in the barrier between Fairyland and the Discworld; the ghosts too enter via windows or portals, spots where the barrier between this world and the next has grown thin.

Both the elves and the ghosts cause their victims to experience terrible feelings; they may even lose the will to live.

It takes the Discworld witches to deal successfully with the elves; in the alternative London of the Lockwood series, only children and teenagers with certain psychic talents are able to detect, deal with and destroy the ghosts.