The Fugitive
A fugitive is someone who flees, escapes, or easily eludes capture and containment. The first-person narrator, Lucy, muses, "Death is fugitive." The metaphor is not used to point out how fast the Grim Reaper moves from one victim to the next. Instead, she is making a point about the actual process of expiration. How it happens quickly, often without being seen, rather than the dramatic way death is drawn out in the movies.
The Darkness
If it's a novel written since the mid-20th century, chances are very high that darkness will be used metaphorically somewhere within. "His darkness was in him always – in those staring wolf-like eyes, in that savage rage he unleashed at the merest slight." One of the reasons for the ongoing and ever-increasing popularity of the darkness metaphor is its flexibility. In this instance, it is effectively used to convey a primal urge to kill. Elsewhere in this book, it is a metaphor for different types of darkness.
Quill Kipps
Quill Kipps works for another agency with which Lockwood and Co. constantly compete. When being charitable, Lucy's narration describes him as young and slight with red hair and freckles. Less charitably, "he’s a pint-sized, pug-nosed, carrot-topped inadequate with a chip the size of Big Ben on his weedy shoulder. A sneer on legs." It is interesting that for the most part, the metaphorical imagery used without diplomacy closely matches the literal description. Interestingly, the last part exists solely within the symbolic sphere.
The Anglican Chapel
A simile can be a powerful tool for describing the setting. An Anglican chapel situated in the middle of a cemetery becomes something much more memorable thanks to the illustrative mechanism of comparison. "After five minutes’ walk we saw the heavy white roof of a building rise among the trees like a whale breaching a dark sea." The simile succeeds in creating a unique image for a building. It also conveys the concept of size efficiently.
The Apparition
Throughout several paragraphs describing the exact ghostly figure, similes are plentiful. "The figure rose into the light, swaying and shaking as if responding to some frenzied internal music...The body’s contortions – minute but somehow frenzied – redoubled, as if it sought to tear itself to pieces...Like a wet dog, it thrashed from side to side... he hellish figure hopped and capered as if dancing with delight." A novel dependent upon describing things that do not—and cannot—exist is going to be mainly in need of the simile's comparative qualities. By engaging such familiar images as dancing and dogs, it becomes much easier to picture this scene in the reader's mind than could be without the similes.
