Ongoing Series. Collections available from Amazon(US) and Amazon(UK).
Publisher: IDW
Writer: Joe Hill
Artist: Gabriel Rodriguez
Locke & Key is essentially the story of a widow and her three children retreating to the patriarch’s ancestral home to deal with the fallout from his brutal murder. And there’s a malevolent spirit with a grudge against the family disguised as one of the children’s friends. Oh, and the family home is littered with keys that possess fantastical powers, one of which may well bring about the end of the world as we know it.
This kind of premise can only have come from a certain type of mind, and when you consider that the mind in question is that of a second-generation horror novelist, you start to see why the resulting output is a bit twisted. Joe Hill, the writer of Locke & Key, is the son of Stephen King – yes, the King who authored Misery, It and The Stand. Not that he wanted you to know that. Hill spent years hiding his heritage from the public, as he strived to make his own name with novels like Heart–Shaped Box and Horns. But, arguably, where Hill has most stood out as a master storyteller in his own right is in the world of comics.
The first story arc, Welcome to Lovecraft, sees the devastated family relocate to their new home of Keyhouse, a suitably gothic estate that houses the dark secrets of the late Mr Locke and his forefathers. While the elder children, Tyler and Kinsey, concern themselves with rebuilding their shattered lives, the task falls to youngest sibling Bode to fully explore the immediate surroundings. It’s not long before he discovers a key and a door that, when combined, produce ghostly results. But the discovery he later makes in the well house is worse by far. To further add to the family’s woes, their father’s murderer has escaped from custody and is being drawn by a malevolent force towards Keyhouse, and another deadly confrontation.
As it progresses, Locke & Key demonstrates that it has a number of visually enticing tricks up its sleeve and artist, Gabriel Rodriguez, proves time and again that he is absolutely the right choice to bring them to the page. One of the keys has the power to literally unlock people’s heads, causing them to open up like a flip-top bin, and allowing you to peek inside at tangible representations of their memories and emotions. These can then be physically removed or added to, leaving the owner forever altered as a result. Who can resist the imagery of young Bode learning recipes by cramming entire cookbooks into his open skull?
The nucleus of the series – a potentially unlimited number of magic keys, all waiting to have the kids stumble onto their varying effects – is serial-storytelling gold. This could so easily have been a series that ran forever, simply by slowing the progress of the dark lady’s diabolical plans and shifting the emphasis to a key-of-the-issue formula – and it’s altogether possible the ill-fated television series may have adopted a similar strategy. Credit is due to Hill and Rodriguez for avoiding this potential pitfall and insisting on a limited lifespan for their comic. In doing so, they have kept each issue feeling fresh and immediate and created something that, rather than exhausting its central conceit, uses it to enhance more character-focused stories. This approach will inevitably leave readers wanting more tales of the keys long after this story of the Locke family has reached its climax.
Currently in the fifth story arc in a planned series of six, the comic book has yet to divert from its tightly structured course and quality remains at a vertigo-inducing high.
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