LOCKE & KEY: WELCOME TO LOVECRAFT by Joe Hill, Artwork by Gabriel Rodriguez, IDW Publishing, 158pgs., $24.99 Hardcover .
     
Most of the story in this graphic novel takes place in the imaginary town of Lovecraft, Massachusetts.  It is the story of the Locke family who move to Lovecraft after the family patriarch Rendell Locke is killed by Sam Lesser.
    
They move into Rendell's childhood home of Locke Manor, a huge mansion with many rooms.
     
The main characters are the Locke children, Bode, Tyler, and Kinsey, who all have had to deal with the death of their father and find different ways of coping with it.
     
Bode spends his time exploring his new home.  While he's exploring, he finds that going through one of the house's doors kills him and makes him a ghost.  My favorite bit in the whole novel.
     
Being dead and a ghost is only a temporary effect, but during one of these trips Bode goes into the wellhouse and down to the bottom of the well where he finds the woman who lives there.  A woman who claims to be his echo and is a major villain in the story.  
      
While the Locke family gets used to their new surroundings, Sam Lesser escapes from prison and starts to make his way towards Lovecraft.  Not to finish off the job of killing the Locke family, but because he's after the Anywhere Key.  Turns out this is why he showed up at the Locke residence to begin with.  
      
The book deals a lot with doors and keys, but the Anywhere Key is the one wanted most because it can take you Anywhere.
       
This is a series that has some interesting cliffhangers at the end of this first book.
       
There are a couple of things I didn't like about this graphic novel.  The first being that it was hard to follow the beginning as the first few pages jump back and forward in time.  The second being the artwork by Rodriguez.  While the art is excellent, I found that some of the characters looked similar enough to each other that I got confused as to who was who.  
        
This did turn out to be good graphic novel despite a somewhat confusing beginning.   

Review

Scary Scrawlings

The Horror Page
   by Mark Fewell