Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
There can be nothing more wonderfully terrifying to the mind than reading something, a classic gothic novel, a piece of macabre inducing poetry or indeed the prosaic style of any of the finest horror writers of the last hundred years, or finding a set of books that just make you squirm with delight with every turn of the page.
For anybody who loves the Graphic Novel, for anybody who the loves horror, Locke & Key is an absolute must and the third in its series, Crown of Shadows, maintains the very high standards that writer Joe Hill and artist extraordinaire Gabriel Rodriguez have thrilled fans with in the previous two books.
Crown of Shadows lurks in the dark like a possessed demon, enthused with taking a deep joy in what it achieves and the soul of its desired reader dripping with shaded and gilded imagination. It also has the touch of humanity that you would expect from Joe Hill. The deep thought to portray someone more than just a hero as some horror writers have tried, to show them as physically broken, mentally damaged and scarred is so much more realistic in a world that doesn’t require a hero but needs someone to step up to the line and declare that enough is enough.
Like his father, Joe Hill captures this physically challenging aspect with a sense of intuition and encouraging apprehension well. Stephen King had the physically abused Rose Madder in which highlight as a women who fought her own demons, Joe Hill has the excellently drawn pseudo matriarch of the family Kinsey Locke and the broken alcoholic Nina Locke. The scenes in which Joe Hill’s words and Gabriel Rodriguez’s painted description of Nina Locke as she slowly descends into a type of miniature psychosis as she wonders if she can bring back her dead husband is not only compelling but also so well framed that you cannot help but feel real sorrow for the woman.
To accomplish this depth of feeling inside the pages of a Graphic Novel takes sheer quality! In a song it would be lauded, in a play, reviewers would be falling over themselves to praise it for all it is worth, in the eyes of someone who admires the work of an artist, you can but weep for the despairing beauty that unfolds before you.
If ever you were told as a child that to read Graphic Novels or comic books was a literary crime and a waste of true reading, get hold of Locke & Key: Crown of Shadows and wave it under the nose of the teacher that made you feel small for admitting that you spent an evening in the arms of a well- drawn picture and sublime line, for Gabriel Rodriguez and Joe Hill will surely have the last word.
Locke & Key: Crown of Shadows is available to purchase from Worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool.
Ian D. Hall