Read FSF, January-February 2010 for Free Online Page B

while Dark Entries proves to be effective as a new Hellblazer adventure, it also works as a telling commentary on the current state of popular culture without even a hint of a lecturing tone.
    The art is in black and white, courtesy of Werther Dell'edera, best known before this as the artist on Vertico's Loveless series. His art is spare, with a lot of vigorous linework, mostly composed of many widescreen panels per page, which I'm assuming is to mimic the experience of watching widescreen TV.
    If you haven't tried Hellblazer before, Dark Entries is an excellent entry point.
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    Locke & Key #1: Welcome to Lovecraft , by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez, IDW Publishing, 2008, $24.99.
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    Locke & Key #1: Head Games , by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez, IDW Publishing, 2009, $24.99.
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    There are so many comics published these days that it's impossible to keep up on them all—not to mention, who can afford to? But there are shining examples of the genre that shouldn't be missed and this is one.
    Readers of this column will be familiar with Joe Hill. He's an acclaimed short story writer and novelist with a handful of awards under his belt and an impeccable lineage for a writer of dark fantasy and horror. Gabriel Rodriguez is best known for his work on Clive Barker's The Great and Secret Show . Together they have created one of the more fascinating and original fantasies I've run across in some time.
    In volume one we meet the Locke children, teenagers Tyler, Kinsey, and their younger brother, Bode. Their father was a teacher and in the opening pages we learn that he has been killed by an ex-student. To get them away from all the attention and hoopla surrounding their father's gruesome death, their mother, Nina, moves them from out west to their father's old family home in New England, to a house named Keylocke in the town of Lovecraft. (You have to ask yourself, if you were in a situation like this, would you move to a place called Lovecraft? But I digress....)
    Keylocke is a big rambling house full of secrets, some of them quirky and kind of cool, some of them deadly. It all hinges around these magical keys. There's the Anywhere Key that allows you to open a door and step through to anyplace you want to be. The Head Key which, when inserted into the back of the head (where a keyhole magically appears), allows you to take out things that you don't like (like the ability to feel sad, or a specific incident) or put in things (such as a textbook from school so that you don't have to study because you know everything in the book now). There's the Ghost Key that when you turn it in a lock, makes you fall down—for all intents and purposes, you're dead, but your ghost can go anywhere. And there are others, their abilities not yet described in the book, like the Gender Key, and the Echo Key.
    Young Bode finds the first of them and that sets into motion a whole string of events that just go from bad to worse. I don't want to tell you too much because the joy of inventive series such as this is in your discovery of each new marvel and danger. Let me just say that Hill never goes exactly where you think he will, and therein lies much of the pleasure.
    I mentioned earlier that the three principal characters are a child and two teenagers, but there's a large cast of all ages and this definitely isn't a book aimed at young adults, though I'm sure they'd enjoy it. I don't know how I missed this series previously, but I'll be checking it out on a monthly basis from now on.
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    Hunting Ground , by Patricia Briggs, Ace Books, 2009, $7.99.
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    Mercy Thompson: Homecoming , by Patricia Briggs, David Lawrence, Francis Tsai, & Amelia Woo, Daniel Brothers Publishing/Del Rey, 2009, $22.95.
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    I'm not going to spend a lot of column space on these two books. It's more to let you know that the second “Alpha and Omega” novel is just as strong a contender as any of Briggs's previous Urban Fantasy books.
    As for Homecoming ,