REVIEW: Locke & Key

Locke & Key: Welcome to LoveCraft

By Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez

First published in 2008

Locke & Key: Welcome to LoveCraft

·         The book notably starts with the death of the father of the Locke family, a key figure who was implied to have had his own mystery adventures back in the day in the series

·         The girl in the well Echo (later to be revealed NOT to be Echo), reminds me much of Sadako from the Ring series.

·         The tale also notably starts with the rape of the mother, which has strained her relationship with her kids.

·         The tale is notably macabre showing the horror of the father’s astral form and the souls of the Locke children having fallen to a ‘dead’ state after going to astral form.

·         Though Echo is notably malevolent, she does keep her promises as in the end she does save the Locke family as promised to Bode and made the murderer Sam powerful by turning him into a ghost

·         Echo also haunts a random lady in the end, implying there is much more to the story than meets the eye

·         The young teenagers who committed the murder and rape are given close to no back story besides passing dialogue. The raping kid only mentions special education and sexual attraction to the mother, but this isn’t usually enough to commit such a crime. Also, Sam somehow manages to kill most everyone he sees, giving a sense of overpowering murder to a seemingly mortal killer in the series.

·         The series also depicts minors being brutally beaten and almost molested/killed on panel, a notably risky narrative style.

·         The keys of magic, so fittingly key to the narrative to the story, are only seen really at the end of the book.

·         The series is set originally in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the characters moving to Massachusetts after the murder.

·         The authority figures in the series are notably incompetent, again requiring the suspension of disbelief that a teenager could overpower a police station worth of police officers to even escape to begin with and had the resources to go cross country to hunt down a family who was more than likely being protected by even more officers. In addition, if Sam had left a string of murders in his wake then the authorities could have predicted a pattern of his moves and acted to redirect the manhunt according to a likely path for him to follow.

·         Fittingly the location in Massachusetts the place is located in is called “Lovecraft,” as the author is the son of another author inspired by  H.P Lovecraft

·         On page 39 there is a provided comic of Bode’s view of the events, which is done with a child’s style of art and narration.

Bibliography

Hill, Joe, and Gabriel Rodriguez. Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft. San Diego, CA: IDW, 2008. Print.