Locke & Key

Do I have the Comic for you. Locke & Key is written by no other than Joe Hill (aka Stephen King's son). In this First part of the the story we meet the Locke family; mother Nina, oldest son Tyler, younger son Bode and daughter Kinsey, as they prepare to move into a large, sprawling estate called Keyhouse. The father, Randall, was shot and killed some weeks before by one of his former students, a very disturbed man named Sam. Randall always told his wife that if anything were to happen to him, he wanted them to come to this mansion located in the fictional town of Lovecraft, Massachusetts, where he and his brother grew up.

Each child is dealing with his or her own issues; Tyler is wracked with guilt because in a moment of frustration he had mentioned, to the very man who killed him, that he wanted his overbearing father dead. Kinsey is trying to blend in with her new school as much as she can; not wanting to be known as the “girl whose father was killed”, and Bode has found a very strange new friend in the well behind the house. An echo, as it calls itself, but not Bode’s…

Keyhouse, the family is told, is very special, and Bode is the first one to find out just how special. The echo tells him that there are certain keys that can be used on certain doors that will make amazing things happen. If he wants to see what it’s like to be an adult, there’s a door that he can use that will show him. If he wants to be a girl, he can walk through one that will switch genders. And then there’s the anywhere key, which will take him anywhere he can imagine, just by thinking of it.

But as we soon learn, Keyhouse is not all just fantastical doorways and magic keys; there’s something very sinister going on just under the surface, something that doesn’t want the Locke family back in this house, and this is what enables Sam to escape from his jail cell and head back to finish the job he started when he killed the family’s patriarch.