Locke & Key Volume 1: Welcome to Lovecraft TP [Paperback]

I'm harder to scare these days than when I was a kid and horror movies were still black and white and filled with trademark Hollywood monsters. Currently, I've been through a plethora of Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, and ghost movies and their spawn. It takes a lot to scare me these days.

Then Hollywood introduced me to FRIDAY THE 13TH, HALLOWEEN, and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. George C. Scott's THE CHANGELING totally creeped me out, and Steven Spielberg's POLTERGEIST taught me to fear my television. Then I watched adaptations of Thomas Harris's novels, RED DRAGON and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and learned to fear serial killers that were really among us.

However, I have to admit that somewhere in there I became jaded. I started watching horror movies for special effects and the snappy one-liners that became so popular. I ended up laughing through most of them.

Like I said, I'm hard to scare. Of course, I can still scare myself pretty good. Let me curl up at night with a Stephen King book or one of Joseph Delaney's THE LAST APPRENTICE YA novels, and I can give myself a case of the willies. These books, thankfully, still deliver the sheer, enervating atmosphere necessary to amp up my adrenaline gland.

But I found a new fear-inducer in Joe Hill. I discovered him in HEART-SHAPED BOX and got totally weirded out listening to that novel on audiobook. Then I got my hands on the first issue of his comic book series, LOCKE & KEY.

Imagine a family that falls victim to what appears to be a deranged teenager looking for some payback. That's pretty horrific by today's standards because the news is full of lethal teens - and others. This could happen, so I wasn't immediately getting the spook vibe.

The story is harsh and emotional. I felt Ty, Kinsey, and Bodie's pain over losing their father to violence. The way that Joe cut the action between the past and present really upped the suspense and impending feeling of doom. Gabriel Rodriguez's art is loose and captivating, and he plays with angles that pulled me right into the frames and turned them into movies. I was THERE, inside the story on several occasions. And I wasn't comfortable being there. Especially in the scenes when Bodie was talking to the thing in the wellhouse!

As it turns out, though, the teen that planned the murder of Papa Locke wasn't entirely there out of vengeance. He had made a pact with the thing in the wellhouse, and that just spins the whole story on its ear.

After their father's murder, the kids end up at the Locke House, a place so riddled with mysteries that Joe says he's got 70 issues plotted out for those bewitched doors, nooks, and crannies already. Personally, I can't wait. I love the puzzles and the mysteries, as well as the fact that THINGS are lurking inside the house and waiting to spring out on unwary victims.

Joe and Gabriel have created a whole WORLD of spine-chilling entertainment to come. It's no surprise that Dimension Films has already snapped up the film rights to the property, or that IDW publishing had to reprint the issues several times. I expect they'll have to reprint the new hardcover graphic novel as well, but I didn't take any chances - I've got my copy already.

In the various issues, Joe shifts the point of view around from Ty to Bodie to Kinsey, and all of them achieve a distinct voice that bring a different flavor to the emerging story. When I read the graphic novel all at once, the voices didn't quite stand out as much as waiting a month between, but that's only because I was trying to get to the end of the story faster and faster. I'd read the first three issues, then couldn't get my hands on the last three, so I was desperate to know what happened next.

The suspense ratchets up like a whipsaw rollercoaster cresting the top of the final plunge leading to a white-knuckled grip (thank God the book is a hardcover or it wouldn't have survived the read!).

I couldn't stop reading, and now I can't wait for the next volume in the Locke family's adventures. The old house as a lot of life (and UNLIFE) still waiting to be discovered and feared.

Horror fans will love this book because it delivers every delicious thrill and chill a reader could want. And Gabriel's art is absolutely eye-popping, alternately beautiful and then gruesome. LOCKE & Key is a definite, pulses-pounding winner.

Hey, here's some trivia for ya....Did you know that Joe Hill's Dad is Stephen King? So no surprise that Hill is pumping out stories of the macabre, right? And he sure is doing it as well as his Dad (especially lately) with Locke & Key.

I was first attracted to Locke & Key when I was reading a February 2011 New York Post article about comics and graphic novels that have been or will be turned into movies or TV series. Locke & Key will be one of the latter with a potential pilot episode airing as soon as the end of this year on FOX. So I thought that I'd get "the real story" from the actual author prior its release as a TV series. And so far, after Book 1, I am not disappointed. (EDIT: 7/2011 - Fox has scratched the Locke & Key pilot - see link in the comment section of this review.)

Like father, like son, Locke & Key is violent at times, bloody at times, scary at times, disturbing at times, but most importantly it is very well written. The Locke's are a seemingly normal young family in California. The father is a principal of a local school. So when the Locke's are rocked by the father's murder by a crazed student, their world turns upside-down, and they are invited to come live out east in a big old spooky mansion in, where else but..."Lovecraft", MA. And you can bet your bottom dollar that in a mansion in a New England town called Lovecraft created by the spawn of Stephen King...thar will be ghosts!

While well written, there are some recycled themes and predictable moments. But mostly Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft is an excellent read for fans of the Fantasy or Horror genres. I'm hooked and looking forward to digging into Locke & Key Volume 2: Head Games and Locke & Key: Crown of Shadows with Locke & Key Volume 4: Keys to the Kingdom due to be released this year.

I'm also really looking forward to the TV series. It seems like it has a promising Supernaturalish chance of succeeding with War of the Worlds/Sarah Connor Chronicles writer Josh Friedman joining on to help Hill get it "out the door" and onto TV.

When I saw the title of this volume, "Welcome to Lovecraft," I had to give it a shot. The fact that it was written by Joe Hill was a bonus, as was the awesome sounding concept of the house with mysterious doors (which sounded--and looked--a lot like the House of Mystery, one of my current favorites). I thought it would be creepy and interesting and fun. And good.

Well, it didn't disappoint. However, it was very dark. Way more dark than I expected (yes, even with the word "Lovecraft" in the title, Sam). It was violent, creepy, shocking, horrifying...and very good.

The story starts with the brutal murder of a high school guidance counselor, which we see in flashbacks throughout the first chapter and the entire volume. After his death, his family moves across the country to the town of Lovecraft, New England, to live in his childhood home Keyhouse, a mysterious mansion where the doors can open to much more than just the next room--if you have the key. Each of the three children deal with their father's death and their new life in a new town differently (Bode, the youngest, finds he enjoys becoming a ghost and chatting with his echo in the old well). Their mother also has some difficulties adjusting. Mixed in with that are flashbacks to their old life and what led up to the murder...and then their past catches up with them.

The opening chapter is incredibly violent, bloody, and intense, and although the violence is turned down a notch after that, it didn't end, even when I thought it was over. It was pretty unrelenting throughout. There just kept being more murder, or more views of the earlier murder, or other violent acts, and then more murder. And when it wasn't violent, it could be pretty creepy or otherwise dark. This isn't meant to urge anyone not to read this, it's simply a warning about how dark it is. I would have liked to have had a chance to prepare myself, so I'm trying to give you that chance.

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