VOLUME 1: WELCOME TO LOVECRAFT
oooooo.... 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 realistic 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 sinister and endearing and magical all at once - and always compelling both the quick turn of the page and the more contemplative search for hidden meaning in past pages.
i really enjoyed this one a lot. i wish i had read it on Halloween. or on a rainy day in a creaky mansion on an island off of massachusetts. heaven!
***
VOLUME 2: HEAD GAMES
oooooo..... more eerie adventures on that strange island in that creepy Keyhouse with that poor, haunted family. wonderful! while the first book was focused on slowly bringing the family and the reader into this fascinating world - introducing a handful of magical keys, throwing out a few hints of the incredible backstory, setting up a confrontation between the family and both a dreadful psycho & a creepy spirit villain - the second book zooms in on one particular key and one particularly fertile concept.
the key in question is fascinating: it gives you the ability to unlock your own head, put things into it (like a textbook! who needs to study? just pop that baby right into the box and all the answers are instantly available), and take things out as well (like bad memories... like fear... like an ability to feel sadness or doubt or even cry). and how this is exactly accomplished is one of the most enjoyable and rather jaw-dropping conceits of Head Games. i literally gasped out loud, then laughed and laughed and laughed. awesome.Head Games is a lot more than just a perfectly realized and fairly unique idea. it takes that idea and expands upon it, in a truly literary style. no, scratch that, not "literary"... this is a graphic novel and the artist Gabriel Rodriguez is an equal partner in the undertaking. his art is wondrous. the word that comes most immediately to mind is limpid. Head Games deals with a lot of cloudy, ambiguous, mysterious goings-on and the art illustrates these mysteries with a clarity that is nearly hallucinatory. does that make any sense? a kind of hallucinogenic, so-real-it's-stylized pellucidity.
but back to what i was saying. what makes Joe Hill such a strong writer is that he doesn't just unveil his gem of an idea and leave it there. he expands upon it, he works through it: what the inside of a person's imagination may look like (some extraordinary details there), how someone's fears and emotions can both hold them back and make them who they are, how we are controlled by our memories of different events and how those memories may differ from reality, how different people engage in different ways with their own personas, and more. a lot of food for thought. it is exciting to see how Hill plays with his ideas while keeping them carefully rooted in an astute, clear-eyed view of how our emotions rule us - how the human mind actually works.
all that plus the stories of two very different but equally tragic supporting characters, a villain who is slippery & cunning & menacing & yet terrifically real, a well-developed gay character, an increasingly intriguing backstory, and some very endearing kid protagonists.
***
VOLUME 3: CROWN OF SHADOWS
oooooo... the eeriest of the eerie, The Crown of Shadows! and what exactly is a crown of shadows? well, the wearer of this fell crown becomes the Dread Lord of All Shadows. and what exactly does that mean? well, shadows become solid and are now at your beck & call - to dance, to fight, to search for magic keys, to battle man and woman (and poor little children and headstrong teenagers as well), to wreak havoc and to bring down terror amongst your enemies. i want one! i can think of a lot of things i could accomplish with this nifty crown. dark, devious, delicate, occasionally despairing, often delightful... this fourth installment in the Locke and Key series is yet more imaginative, high-quality adventure. kudos, creators! this series is surely one of the finest achievements in graphic novels birthed in the new millenium. the art is typically splendid - vivid, beautifully colored, often happily surprising. the sight of a giant-sized Tyler opening up the Key House like it was a dollhouse - opening it up from the inside - was worth the price of admission. just as well-done: a marvelous opening battle between two swirling ghosts (with two very different agendas).
Joe Hill's writing remains top-notch. this volume has less characterization than previous volumes and often feels like a non-stop whirl of action. all of that is accomplished perfectly. but he remains a writer of depth; in between and during the adventures, we see Kinsey continue to form tangible, supportive, rather off-beat friendships and we continue to see the impact of her literal removal of the ability to feel either fear or sadness. rather a mixed bag, that. we also see the drunken mother... remain a drunken mother. not a whole lot of wish fulfillment there. the mother is sympathetic, sad, pathetic, and monstrous - all at once.
***
VOLUME 4: KEYS TO THE KINGDOM
oooooo... the eeriest of rollercoaster rides, a rush of images, sinister vistas zooming in and out of view, unreal tableau cascading pell-mell, willy-nilly, hurly-burly: an homage to Bill Watterson, a bloody battle between birds and wolves; racial dismay and distortion in an insane asylum; a hockey loss, a greenhouse comes alive, sprouting wings, battling chains, battling squirrels, a death-tune, the end of friendships, battling teddy bears, battling friends, the worst way to win at hockey; an homage to EC Comics, soldiers in battle, a ghost with an agenda and an autistic child, a "philososcope"; a long-awaited confrontation, the return of a terrible tune, a terrible death, a terrible transformation... Hill (brilliant writing) and Rodriguez (brilliant art) unleash everything at once and the effect is wonderfully disorienting, the carefully scattered puzzle pieces begin uniting in mad spurts, the slow pace moves into fast-forward, everything comes together, everything falls apart... my hands gripped this volume too tightly, my eyes wide, my mouth agape, my brain began to hurt...***
VOLUME 5: CLOCKWORKS
oooooo..... eerie backstory time! and the infernal force behind it all is... and this is no spoiler because hey check out the title of the first volume... CTHULHU! of course. i've been waiting for that title to have real relevance. ah, Cthulhu. ::happy sigh::
well maybe not Cthulhu specifically (rest in peace), but one of his siblings: that fetid pool of unlife, the "she-goat of a thousand young"... Shub-Niggurath! yay!
this is another superb volume in the superb series. this one is all about the reasons why and the how things happened and the when - most importantly, the when. the featured key takes you back in time to witness various important events. we get to see revolutionary america. we get to see the dead father of our young protagonists, when he and his peers were about their age. we get to see lots of things.[Enter Positive Comments Here]. i can say nothing about this series that hasn't been said before, by me and by many others. it is brilliant. the dynamic characterizations, the layered mysteries, the sadness and melancholy and loss and sense of wasted potential and wasted lives, the feeling of a grand adventure gone terribly wrong, the genuine sympathy that Hill creates for his vividly depicted cast, all the subtlety and nuance... all there, intact. the art is just as wonderful. i love it! across the board, no complaints.
***
GUIDE TO THE KNOWN KEYS
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GRINDHOUSE
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picture if you will a sick child. the child is brave, the child is sweet, the child is loved. the child longs for adventures his frail little body will never allow him. the child will die in agony. picture if you will a father. if you were the father to such a child, what would you do? you are a father who has done things, who can do things, magic things. and yet there is no magic cure. but perhaps you can do something yet. create a fantasia, create a perfect childworld. bring back ghosts from the past. take your child backstage of the world's theatre and show him that there is wonder there too. take your precious child to the moon, and beyond!
picture if you will a home invasion. a trio of scumbags, each one worse than the last. they truck in death - murder and rape and molestation; they deserve death themselves. picture a happy home waiting to be invaded and picture a happy family of sitting ducks. does this make you anxious? never fear! the home is The Keyhouse. the family is armed with keys. Magic Keys! pity instead the hapless home invaders. no, scratch that. rejoice in their destruction! it is well-earned and especially tasty.
Hill constructs a sweet and ever so sad fable in the first - a paean to what can never be and what may still be, in dreams, in a father's hopes and fears for his child, in places a child may go but never return. Rodriguez matches him with art that is by turns winsome, grounded, and just a little bit phantasmagorical.
Hill creates a vivid and visceral tale full of mordant humor in the second. you've seen these characters before, in cheap grindhouse films. here they are placed in a new setting, The Keyhouse - but with all of your typical grindhouse film's jacobean-revenge-drama-writ-small nastiness left intact. Rodriguez matches him with art that is influenced by film noir and low-budget horror movies and, of course, ugly grindhouse cheapies.
good stuff!
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