“Pull yourself off your cross. Someone could probably use the wood.”—Thoughts on Locke & Key

[a_flyleaf]

After Mr. Locke is murdered before his family’s eyes, his three kids and widow move to a family estate, where they grapple with literal demons, psychological demons, and echoes of the past.

Okay. Okay. I’m done, I read the series, I took a few minutes—er, maybe a lot longer than a few minutes—to get over the “I just finished a really good series and all I can say is [INCOHERENT SCREAMING]” phase.

And yet! Locke & Key, a graphic novel series by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, was the read I’ve been looking for to remind me why I fucking love comics (and big ambitious storytelling sagas in general). This is going to be less a coherent review and more vaguely-coherent screaming, similar to my thoughts on Alan Moore’s Watchmen and V for Vendetta, but without the bullet points because that doesn’t read as nicely.

Great story. Fantastic characters. On at least two separate occasions after turning a page, I had to stop, stare at it for while to process, and flip back and forth maniacally because no way that did NOT just happen. It’s billed as a horror series, but it’s far from cheap scares—character development is in full focus, from the protagonists to one-scene wonders.



Entirely Skippable Mundane Personal Context

The entire main series has been on my library’s shelf for a long time. I’m not sure when it first came in, but I know I kept wandering back to it when looking for a new graphic novel to read. And I took one look at that dark, red-and-black cover, the art on the back, and the almost-trying-too-hard title (Welcome to Lovecraft? That’s a blatant shout-out if I ever saw one), and was… not impressed.

Don’t judge a book, I know, I know. But I figure there’s so much visual media out there, if I’m going to get into something new, it better be something I enjoy looking at. I’m sure there are great stories I’ve missed out on because the art style didn’t appeal to me, and I know I’ve managed to get into series with art styles that initially turned me off (this one included). Such is visual media.

Anyway, after reading Watchmen, I asked a librarian friend for comic recommendations. Among them were other, probably better-known series that I either haven’t read yet or tried and couldn’t get invested in, but of course Locke & Key was there and I gave it a shot for real.

Boy, am I glad I did.

Quick Note on Spoilers
First things first: If you’re remotely interested in this series, and avoiding spoilers is important to you, do NOT look it up. Don’t. Go to your library or bookstore, grab the first edition or two, and dive in.

The Wikipedia plot summary ]throws a huge chunk of backstory into the first paragraph, and the wikia’s even worse. There’s a reason I wrote that opening blockquote—official descriptions, imo, don’t do this series justice, but digging any deeper will yield more information than necessary.

I’m usually not one to avoid spoilers, especially since late-series twists are often what gets me to invest in media in the first place. But even though I read this series over several weeks during slower hours at work, I avoided spoilers the whole way through.

This was, in retrospect, an excellent decision.

I’m going to try keeping this rambling spoiler-free, but it will inevitably come up later. Dreamwidth seems to allow multiple cut tags which is pretty cool, and I’ll make use of those as needed. (Can you tell I’m not planning this? I never plan my text walls. Those are called essays and I resent them.)

TL;DR This will contain spoilers, albeit with additional warnings. Proceed with however much caution seems fitting to your tastes.

Actual Thoughts
You ever find a series that hits all the nails on the head? Gripping plotline, excellent characterization, shocking but well-foreshadowed twists, and straight-up smart? I mentioned this earlier, but it bears repeating: I fucking love this series.

Art
Now, I know I said part of the reason this comic didn’t grab my attention at first was the art style. By now I’ve gotten used to it and actually kinda love it, so I can’t pinpoint what turned me off.



I think it’s the faces? It’s something about the faces. I don’t know. I don’t care. For a relatively realistic style, the characters are expressive as hell, and don’t even get me started on the detail!

And while I can’t find any spoiler-free page samples to demonstrate, the layout as a comic is excellent. I didn’t find as many “oh man, I gotta take notes on this” setups here as I did Watchmen, but not once did I find myself wondering where to look next, even when the panels broke the mid-page gutter.

Special shout-outs to the parts where glass breaks and a character falls. You’ll know exactly what I’m talking about when you get to it. The latter was a blatant, end-of-issue gut punch; the former less immediately heartbreaking, but the understated melancholy is exactly what hit me.

Writing
So, I don’t hit you over the head with “everyone gets ample development and then some” point, but still. It happens. I went from thinking the central Locke trio were “neat but archetypal” to “oh god I love these kids,” especially in the last volume. Actually, the last volume sucker punched me a lot with basically everyone. That second pageturn moment, with a character falling? I found them well-developed before that moment but not particularly interesting, and then That Happened and suddenly I love that character.

The central characters are the Locke kids, particularly highschoolers Tyler and Kinsey, but when the point of view wandered (which it did frequently), I never found myself thinking “Can we just get back to the main characters already?”

What really strikes me about the characterizations is that they feel so genuine. Sure, on the surface, the cast might fall into various cliches, but it never read like there was a conscious effort to say “hey, we’re trying to subvert an archetype here, please praise the writing for being revolutionary!” The people are just… people. I always appreciate that, but especially so here because it’d be so easy to fall into that.

Hell, on occasion characters even comment on situations seeming like something out of a movie, but it never feels like a writerly self-backpat of “ha, this isn’t stereotypical because I’m acknowledging how stereotypical it seems!”

(There’s a certain brand of Trying Too Hard In Writing that I’ve had mixed feelings about lately, can you tell? But that’s another topic for another time.)

[This is the part where I start going into story specifics without a cut; last chance to bail if you want to dive in blind.]

To use an example (and ramble about a favorite character for a bit), take Kinsey, the middle Locke kid. During the attack that leads to Mr. Locke’s death, she hides with her younger brother Bode on the roof, allowing them both to escape unscathed. Later, Kinsey reflects on this in an entire issue essentially dedicated to her insecurities: she’s always running—from peer pressure, from getting attached to people, from herself—and she’s sick of it.

All right. Angsty highschool girl, with an extra dose of “great, my dad got murdered” trauma.

Then she makes herself physically unable to be afraid or sad.

This runs parallel to her older brother Tyler trying something similar, thanks to some newfound Key Shenanigans (which I won’t go into detail about for spoiler’s sake), and his side of the storyline runs about as you might expect: new ability seems great at first, except oh wait it’s not as good as it seemed, and he learns a valuable lesson and never tries it again. I mean, it’s still executed well, just not a subplot to write home about.

Kinsey, meanwhile? doesn’t get her negative emotions back for the rest of that volume. Or the next.

And she’s having an okay time with it.

It doesn’t turn her into some Heartless Monster, and it doesn’t throw her entire characterization out the window. I think the series takes full advantage of exploring everywhere “I suddenly can’t feel upset at all” can go, from making new friends she’d never dream of talking to otherwise, to life-or-death situations that would be a lot more terrifying if she could be, y’know, terrified. Kinsey even remarks here and there that not being anxious ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, but more as a detached observation than anything—can’t be angsty or sad about it, after all, since that’s kinda the point!

(Something something depression metaphor…? I dunno, other people could talk about this angle better than me, but it was only the fear/sadness being taken away, not motivation or ability to feel positive.)

The longer this went on, of course, the more I thought it was gonna hit like a brick when the feelings inevitably returned. And as expected, it didn’t happen until towards the end, but by then I was too engrossed by surrounding plot developments to really want that melodrama. Unexpectedly, it wasn’t melodramatic at all, especially with so much endgame drama building up.

Point is, this was an interesting character progression. I can’t say every character takes unexpected turns, but I still learned enough about everyone important to not walk away thinking they were shallow or robbed by the narrative!

Oh yeah, and did I mention people are smart? People are smart. The kids figure things out without needing to cling to an ancient guidebook or mysterious mentor figure. I feel like this is a low bar and shouldn’t even need to be said, and to be fair I haven’t reread everything with an analytical eye (yet). I just know there was never a point where I was thinking “this is going to get you killed in a really stupid way like a horror movie intro,” even at the actual start of the story where someone (hi, Dad) gets axed. That’s always appreciated.

Miscellaneous Thoughts
The previous section was originally going to be titled “Writing – Characters,” but, several futile attempts at rambling further without giving everything away later, I think that’s the best I can offer.

Don’t get me wrong, the plot’s interesting, and the antagonist is great. Not revolutionary or even super developed, but fun as hell to watch. Actually, I was a little disappointed by having such a supernatural, otherworldly antagonist in an otherwise somewhat grounded story, but then again this is a story where people can reach into heads and pluck memories out.

I guess I was just expecting less over-the-top villain gravitas? Mostly, I feel like the “the demon is from another world” setup was cheap, and the Ultimate Plan and Gratuitous Monologuing towards the end was a little… eh. Didn’t ruin the story, not at all, and I don’t wanna say it could’ve been better because the pieces fell together well enough. I just didn’t like what one of those pieces happened to be.


Anyway, if there’s a fanbase for this series with character analyses and symbolism breakdowns, can I get in? Because this series is ripe for character analyses and symbolism breakdowns. There are so many recurring motifs and such great foreshadowing, I went and got myself the entire series for Christmas so I can reread it forever without hogging the library’s only copy \o/

…Granted, we’ll see if that lasts in the long term. It might be like Watchmen in that, while I thoroughly enjoyed the initial read and will definitely recommend it, it’s actually so damn good that I don’t feel the need to engage further.

But regardless, the urge to yell about Locke & Key is strong at the time of writing, hence why I typed up this (6-page) review/ramble about it! And if I haven’t convinced you just yet, here’s a couple quotes from the author, courtesy this article (bold mine)—which, by the way, you SHOULD NOT READ if you care about spoilers at all. It’s a reflection on the entire series and states the climactic plot twist in one sentence midway through.

These other artists did draw really great, gory stuff, like, demons ripping skeletons out of human bodies and stuff. But that’s not really what makes horror work. You know, throwing as much gore at the reader is not what makes something scary. What I liked about Gabe, when I looked at his art, was his characters had these wonderful, lively faces that expressed emotions and interior thought. And I thought: that’s actually how good horror begins, when you fall in love with a character. Then, when they suffer the worst, you’re along on the ride with them—you’re invested and you care. I knew when I saw the way Gabe worked with characters that we would be able to make something good together.

Rodriguez [the writer] was formerly an architect and painstakingly created 3-D models of the house so as to get his bearings for his illustration. His architectural background was a huge boon because it helped him realise, early on, that Keyhouse would be one of the main characters. “Even being just a house, it has to be a house that has to be able to tell a story about itself and to express mood.”

Apparently there’s been an attempt or two to get a TV series off the ground. I’m game, if it comes to fruition, albeit wary as I would be with any adaptation of media I think is brilliant in its original form. Also, being a fan of Naoki Urasawa’s Monster and remembering the short-lived hype over that live-action adaptation that apparently got stuck in development hell, I try not to hype myself up about only-announced projects much :V

But hey, if it gives me more people to yell about Locke & Key with, can’t complain!