I've noticed something very interesting about the structure of The Locked Tomb series recently, in that it is a series that is immeasurably more than the sum of its parts. Not that that's an uncommon thing for serialized media, it's literally the point of the format to tell a deeper story as a whole than is told in any one installment, but I think tlt is a particularly extreme example.
Like, gtn is the only book in the series that works at all as a standalone story. In most series, if you skip a book, you'll be confused about specifics and backstories and what have you, but you'll probably be able to follow along and get the gist of the theming, even if you miss some details and subtleties.
With this series, though, the subsequent books (especially HtN but also NtN) are essentially incomprehensible if you've skipped the previous books. They don't follow a predictable trajectory from the previous books that can be back-extrapolated from their stand alone contents. Like, genuinely try to imagine what you would think the previous books must have been about if you just read Nona. Imagine what you'd think the themes were. It's completely out of wack.
This is because each new book in the series isn't just a continuation of the previous books - it is in dialogue with the previous books. Each new book is a commentary on what came before, a reinterpretation that forces you to rethink or even reread the previous books with a different perspective that draws more layers of meaning to the surface. It makes the series feel like a knot that you're slowly unpicking - each new thread that is revealed to you changes how you perceive the weave of the previous threads.
I fucking love this. It makes the series incredibly rereadable, and it rewards spending a lot of time contemplating and theorizing about what you've read, which is excellent because the books are written in such a way that they invite you to ask questions without giving you answers. It make you feel ecstatic when you achieve a new level of understanding of a story you had thought you already understood.
There's a drawback to this, though, in that it makes the first read-through of a new book in the series the worst read-through. Again, HtN is infamous for this, verging on incomprehensible on a first pass but bristling with rich meaning and evocative prose on a second, but it's a trait that applies to all three books released so far. On a first read, lacking the context of the later series, GtN's story feels straightforward, sometimes juvenile, full of relatively simple but evocative characters, and burdened with what seems to be needlessly obtuse and obscure worldbuilding that only exists to slow down the reader's attempts to solve the murder mystery and to act as a backdrop to be cut through by Gideon's harshly modern and irreverent quips. (Sidenote, but as much as that is a thing that a lot of the fandom really enjoys, I know a few people who found that choice extremely jarring and unpleasant. It is a polarizing structural choice, it just doesn't seem like it because people who don't like it don't often stick with the series long enough to get invested in the deeper themes and plot of the series).
NtN too follows this format, although we don't yet have the added context of it's sequel, so a lot of what it has to say remains maddeningly out of reach. It certainly enriches rereads of the previous books, though; a lot of people have gone into great detail about how Nona's perspective on Kiriona reframes our perception of Gideon as a narrator. And John's accounting of the end of the world and the Resurrection adds so many more layers to all the interactions we witness in HtN.
It's just a very unique way to build a story, to start with something fairly simple and self-contained and then spend the next two books layering more and more meaning on those events. For me, it's not the characters (much as I love them) but the structure of the series that keeps me so fucking obsessed with these books.
