Product Description

Locke & Key tells of Keyhouse, an unlikely New England mansion, with fantastic doors that transform all who dare to walk through them.... and home to a hate-filled and relentless creature that will not rest until it forces open the most terrible door of them all...! Acclaimed suspense novelist and New York Times best-selling author Joe Hill (Heart-Shaped Box) creates an all-new story of dark fantasy and wonder, with astounding artwork from Gabriel Rodriguez.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #125905 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 152 pages

Customer Reviews

Simply excellent
This is the first comic book series that I read in my return to comics after a 15 year absence and it is proof of how far they have come. Intelligent, poignant,emotional,shocking and thrilling in equal measure, Joe Hill has created a compelling and believable world - I am very much looking forward to the next episodes.

Clumsy craft
A family holidaying in a cabin are attacked by a pair of teenage thugs and the father is shot before the thugs are taken down. One of the thugs is killed while the other goes to a juvenile institute. The family relocate to Lovecraft, Massachussetts to the dead father's brother's house for a fresh start. Here they find the place has several mysterious rooms which when opened with several mysterious keys leads to strange and ghostly things. Passing through a certain door turns you into a ghost, while the well in the garden has a vengeful sprite. Then the thug in juvenile breaks out and comes for them...

Sounds promising no? Especially when you find out Joe Hill, Stephen King's son, is behind it but given his debut novel was an absolute mess it's perhaps less of a surprise to find this book to be a similar jumble of anachronisms and cliches. I won't go too much into it but none of the characters were very interesting and no series can run for long without an interesting central character of a decent cast. The storyline, while somewhat interesting, becomes quite generic and lacking in suspense once you realise any obstacles the author half heartedly puts in the villain's way are brushed aside off stage.

The teen thug's behaviour, the villain of the story, is explained in a lazy half page catch-all. His father beat him. Brilliant insight. It's like child abuse = psychopath. But then given that he is King's son, it's not like I'd expect complicated characters. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, that's that.

Then to have such a bland, everyday family suddenly inhabit this Lovecraft-esque house is just too sloppy. How did this house come to be? Why does it contain so many magic doorways? How can you become a ghost? As for the evil sprite's presence, this is unexplained and left for later issues to address. Basically it feels like a young adult rush set up of a halfway decent but poorly executed story. Joe Hill's writing the kind of stories his dad wrote - ghosts, haunted houses - but not even coming close to the heights King reached in his day.

Really excellent
Beautiful book, great story, fantastic artwork, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and I can't wait for part 2!