Dodge is one conniving and duplicitous mother-effer. His malicious eyes, peepers of utmost evil, are as haunting as they are hypnotic. Ever since he left his prison (the Locke family well) with the help of Sam Lesser, and since changing his sex using the Gender key, he's been dead-set on disrupting the new-found tranquility of the Locke children, as his goal of finding all the keys of Keyhouse is fully underway. Not even Joe Ridgeway, an elderly Drama teacher at the Lovecraft Academy, who recognizes Dodge as the evil incarnate that he is from many years back, is able to foil his plans and prevent him from gaining the trust and confidence of Tyler and Kinsey under false pretenses. Dodge, at least up to now, seems to be an incarnation of Satan himself, a powerful and deceitful being whose intentions have no kindness in them, only lies and destruction of order.
In Locke & Key: Head Games, the second volume of Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez's enigmatic, gothically delicious ghost tale, we're introduced to Dodge's malevolent side, while also witnessing young Bode experiment with the Head key, which he uses much to his and his siblings' surprise. This key has the power of taking away a person's weakness out of their mind: their fear, their sadness, anything that may be holding them down and keeping them from reaching their potential. Kinsey, still depressed over what happened to her father in the first volume, naturally removes fear out of her head, and she displays the newly discovered results of her unlimited courage by telling Dodge that she has a crush on him. But little does she know what his true intentions are.
Meanwhile, in a flashback (stylishly executed in a fashionable black & white art), we learn of Ellie's relationship with her abusive late mother, and the events that led to her mysterious death. We also meet Ellie's son, Rufus, a very special boy who may not be as mentally challenged as he appears, and whose code-speak he uses with his toy soldiers might be more than playful gibberish of a slow witted boy. Rufus may very well be a genius of sort, a la Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man, a person so "disadvantaged" mentally that he doesn't even know what he's capable of.
Head Games enriches the Locke & Key universe with additional characters, and it also gives us a more in-depth look at the private life of Duncan Locke, both as an adult and as a child (he apparently has been exposed to the secrets of Keyhouse as a young boy, but has forgotten them as he grew up). The Head key, one of the centerpieces of this volume, is a very unique key, and its power lies in not opening any doors, but opening the human mind, and altering its contents. It's kind of like the genius of Hill and Rodriguez, where they're so easily able to alter the contents of their readers' minds, always looking to astonish and instill a sense of wonder, without ever boring us.
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