Book Review // Locke and Key, Vol. 1

 
Locke and Key, Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft by Joe Hill
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Locke and Key was one of my first forays into the graphic novel. And what a great way to start out. I'm a fan of Joe Hill anyway after reading 'Heart Shaped Box' and this book didn't disappoint at all. The illustrations only added to the story, not distracting from it. I can't wait to start reading the rest of the series.

If you've been interested in starting to read graphic novels, this is definitely a great way to get into them. 

An eerie old mansion on a woody estate, strange mysteries and dangerous secrets, a tangled and forgotten past, a san francisco family of three - father slain - seeking a new life on an island named Lovecraft off the coast of massachusetts, in a place called The Keyhouse. A beautiful girl who lives at the bottom of a well, an insane killer on the hunt for magical keys, doors that open into odd places, walk through one door and change your gender, walk through another door and turn into a ghost... who knows what else? The mysteries multiply. awesome! 

The art is excellent: a muted kind of vivid, smooth and professional, with a sometimes whimsical but basically grounded approach to illustrating the characters. And the writing is even better. Characterization and narrative feel carefully honed, sketched with smaller strokes, intimate details parsed out slowly, the mysteries unfolding at an even pace, flashbacks that adroitly serve to both increase suspense and to render each character completely understandable, the narrative by turns sinister and endearing and magical - and always compelling both the quick turn of the page and the more contemplative search for hidden meaning in past pages.

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