Locke & Key (the complete graphic novel) 
After a brutal, and seemingly random, murder of their father, three siblings: Tyler, Kinsey, and Bode Locke relocate with their grieving mother Nina to the old family estate of the Keyhouse, located in a remote part of fictional town Lovecraft, Massachusetts. They come here to forget about the terrible tragedy which befell their family and start a new life.
However, the killer of their father – Sam Lesser, helped by an evil spirit called Dodge, escapes from a juvenile detention centre where he is held, and slowly but surely makes his way across the states towards Lovecraft, leaving a trail of murder and destruction in his wake. Unsuspecting Locke family is confronted by revengeful Sam, who, impelled by Dodge, is holding Tyler and Kinsey hostage and, confusingly, demands from Nina a couple of old keys for their release.
When the situation looks completely hopeless, Bode finds one of the keys and gives it to Dodge, who, in guise of a pretty young woman, befriends him earlier. Dodge uses the key to break free from the wellhouse, where she is held, and promises that she will rid the family of Sam Lesser in return. Tyler and Kinsey strain their last reserves of power and manage to fight off Sam, who seemingly breaks his neck while running, badly hurt, away from the house. The Locke family is at last free from their tormentor and can return to their normal life. Or so it seems. Little they suspects that the evil which Bode unwittingly unleashed is a thousand times worse than Sam Lesser could ever have been.
Malevolent Dodge, now free from his prison and disguised as Locke kids’ best friend, will stop at nothing to get the Omega Key – the key to the Black Door which is the only barrier holding back the invasion of demons from another world. The other keys, spread throughout the Keyhouse, are all endowed with various supernatural abilities and have the power to stop the demon invasion, and save the Locke family in the process, if used in a right way.
Tyler, Kinsey, and Bode will gradually find more and more powerful keys with increasingly more and more bizarre abilities, and bit by bit unravel all secrets of the Keyhouse’s dark history, until they realise that the gruesome death of their beloved father wasn’t just a random act of violence, but only another chapter in a long and intricate story, where good and bad, present and past, and reality and fantasy are all intrinsically intertwined.
Original, witty and beautifully illustrated throughout, Locke & Key not only entertains, but is also not afraid to tackle such tricky, or, I dare say, taboo subjects such as attitude to the mentally ill, boundaries of the freedom of speech, and racial inequality in the United States.
The comic, written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez, won several prestigious awards, such as 2012 British Fantasy Award for Best Comic or Graphic Novel, and was even picked for a TV series adaptation.
Unfortunately, after a pilot was produced (staring an American actor and singer Jesse McCartney as Tyler Locke) and very well received at the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con International, the 20th Century Fox who acquired the television rights, pulled the plug on the franchise and announced that the project would not be made into TV series. The show has been then eyed by MTV, though that also came to no fruition. We can only hope that some other TV network will see the huge potential of this original comic book and eventually resurrect the promising project.
The graphic novel, however, stands very well on its own, and maybe it is for better.
If you were living in a cave at the foothill of Himalayas for the past 6 years, and haven’t heard anything about Locke & Key, now is the opportunity to get this superb comic book complete, in a neat, 6 volume collected edition. Miss this graphic novel at your peril.
26/02/2014
