I do not. Do. Serial killers.
I bring this up to explain the multi-year gap between reading the first volume of Locke and Key (like 2011ish I want to say?) and now, finishing the series. The first volume gets kinda serial-killer-y, is my recollection, and I did not care for that. I will not abide with stories about serial killers, except I guess that one time I made an exception for Lauren Beukes because everyone said “definitely definitely make an exception for Lauren Beukes” okay but apart from that, NO EXCEPTIONS.
Locke and Key, incidentally, is not about serial killers. It’s about three kids and their mother, who move to their father’s ancestral home after he is brutally murdered in their home in ?California?. In the ancestral home there are keys, and the keys have magic, and someone called Dodge is willing to do absolutely anything to get his hands on the full set of keys. His goals are unclear but self-evidently nefarious.
I binged on this series after a 4th of July barbecue that nearly put me in a food coma, and the upshot was that it was dark and fireworksy after I finished, and I had to go all over my apartment and turn on all the lights in all the rooms just to make triple sure there were no shadow animal monsters or other types of bad guys anywhere in my place. (There were not any. Coast was clear.)
So, if you’re up for some quite scary monster-type horror (not serial killer-type! that is a type of horror with which I have no truck!) in comic book format, you probably have already read Locke and Key because duh. If you haven’t yet, give it a go! It’s scary! But the good guys win!
(Er, spoiler alert? Except not really because let’s be serious for a sec: You know how books work. The good guys always win.)