After the brutal murder of their father, Tyler, Kinsey, and Bode Locke move across the country with their mother to live with their uncle Duncan at Keyhouse, the Locke family home in Lovecraft, Massachusetts.
Because, after a horrific family tragedy—and believe me, this is a bad one—you want to move straight to a town called Lovecraft. (<--Joking, obvs.)
As any self-respecting fan of H.P. Lovecraft will have guessed by now, Keyhouse isn't your ordinary ancestral family home. And it looks like it's taken a shine to Bode, the youngest of the Locke siblings. Question is, is that a good thing?
Meanwhile, despite his incarceration, it's clear that we haven't seen the last of Rendall Locke's murderer, and he appears to have a supernatural ally...
Artwork? Thumbs up. It's stylized and cool, but it still conveys a lot of emotion in the faces and the body language of the characters. The flashbacks have more muted colors, but none of the reds, past or present, are as red as the blood spilled during the attack or the urn holding Rendall Locke's ashes.
There are tons of details that I only noticed on my second or third read—like, the prison guard's grocery list; that during the attack, Mrs. Locke suffered a sexual assault; or that in the After sequences, she's walking with a cane and has a subtle grey streak in her hair—and I'm sure that I'll notice even more when I read it again.
Storyline? Obviously, this is the first issue, so there's a lot of set up. But it's done really, really well, in that it doesn't feel like one of those crummy pilot episodes with all of the hammy introductions and forced explanations of everyone's relationships. It feels like the beginning of a story, but it also feels like the continuation of a story: these people didn't just drop out of the sky—they have histories and backgrounds and they feel like real people (not characters) from the first panel. Even though it seems (at the moment) like the woo-woo stuff is centered around Bode, everyone is dealing with their grief and their own personal stuff in regards to what happened the day that Sam Lesser and his buddy showed up on their doorstep at the tail-end of a killing spree.
Bode and Kinsey are coping. Or, at least, they appear to be coping—Bode, being younger, a little more easily than Kinsey, as he has the distraction of a big old rambling house with a possibly magic door to distract him. Kinsey didn't have a big role in this issue, though I'm hoping for more: judging by the way she took charge of Bode in the crisis, she clearly has some extreme reserves of inner toughness, but she's also clearly (understandably) struggling with what's happened to her family, and in conversation, she mentioned pretty matter-of-factly that Tyler was his father's favorite.
And then there's Tyler, who had a lot of trouble getting along with his father, and who knew Sam Lesser. Had conversations with him. And, after his father's murder, Tyler bludgeoned him into submission with a brick. Of the three Locke kids, he's the only one who saw what happened in the house that day. So he's dealing with a lot of extremely painful memories, a lot of guilt, and from a lot of different corners, all of them internal.
All that, and he's a bit worried about starting out at a new high school. Remember this bit from Season One of The O.C.?:
Luke: Maybe I can just blow the whole thing off. Go to the beach, give everybody time to get it out of their systems.
Ryan: It doesn't work like that. It's been months and I'm still the kid from Chino that burned a house down.
Marissa: And I'm still the girl who tried to kill herself in Mexico.
Seth: I'm still... I'm still Seth Cohen.
Luke: Man this is going to suck.
Seth: Yeah, well, welcome to my world.
There's a similar—albeit far darker—moment in issue #1 of Locke and Key:
Read the next one? OH MY, YES. In fact, I'm thinking very seriously about ILLing all of the trades so that I can get caught up, like, STAT. Because this is one that I think I could love.
I read this a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. In fact, I KNOW I read the other one but think I stopped for no other reason than forgetting to remember.
Posted by: christina | 12 April 2012 at 09:24 PM
Intriguing. I should see if I can get a copy of this from the library.
Posted by: karen | 14 April 2012 at 01:06 PM
Ordered it! (I found the TP was a little hard to get.)
But yeah, I think this might be the book that gets me into graphic novels, since I never did get into them as a kid.
Posted by: Katie | 15 April 2012 at 08:33 AM
Woo! I'm hooked!
*bows down to you*
Posted by: Katie | 29 April 2012 at 12:45 PM