…Rhymes with Leavin’ Bing

          After walking with the dead, I was a little nauseous going into Locke & Key, my latest graphic novel experiment.  The cover was foreboding, the rigid spine matched the skeleton key glowing on the front cover, and the house loomed in the background like evil incarnate.  And rather ironically, the delicate red bookmark hanging from the bottom reminded me of a bible.   And then… I opened it…

        First off, as an old school books-with-no-pictures reader, I have had to literally teach myself to “read” graphic novels.  My eyes are immediately drawn to words, and with up to half a page of squares with pictures and no dialogue, I had to force myself to slow down and really absorb the graphics.   Luckily, I was not disappointed.  Gabriel Rodriguez saturates each block with color both rich and muted at the same time.  His character’s faces show expression and mimic inflection and tone in a way that dialogue alone cannot.  There is an attention to detail that I found visually pleasing.

            But the story itself was the most impressive thing.  After gory depictions of zombie madness, I was actually enraptured with a storyline that dealt with no monsters, no magic, but rather with evil itself.  Both the magic and the monster part are debatable as there are both present, but I appreciate the matter-of-factness of its presence, not hiding behind ruses of decaying dead humans or psychological themes of human reaction.  Give me Satan as a woman over zombies any day.

            So who is this Joe Hill who creates evil so deep and inter-connected with the world around it?  If you don’t already know, he happens to be the son of a great horror author, yet Hill needs not tread in his father’s shadow to evoke fear and pity in his audience (by the way, his father’s name rhymes with Leavin’ Bing). 

            In short, this is a must read for fans of graphic novels, fans of horror as a literary genre, and fans of Gabriel Rodriguez (new fan right here!).  Not to mention, die hard fans of most of the above will already know why Robert Crais warns in his foreword to this novel to “…NOT retreat to a town called Lovecraft.”