If you’ve not read the brilliant comic book series Locke & Key, stop here, start there, and allow me to envy you your first journey through what is, in my opinion, one of the finest uses of the graphic novel medium to date. Locke & Key is a six-volume series, a fantastic story interwoven from equal parts awe-inspiring wonder and true horror, marvelous and genuinely scary. It easily could’ve been a novel written by Joe Hill, but the visual storytelling of artist Gabriel Rodríguez enhances the incredible creativity and impressive freakiness immeasurably, elevating the tale of Keyhouse to something truly exceptional. The story is set in and around a very special house, belonging to the Locke family, that contains magic keys, each of which has a unique supernatural function. And that’s all I’m going to tell you because the less you know ahead of time, the better it is. So! Locke & Key: Small World is a brand new, standalone story set in the past of Keyhouse and concerning previous generations of the Locke family. It’s a perfectly self-contained little tale full of great big horrors and makes for a most welcome, albeit brief, return to the terrifyingly imaginative world of Locke & Key. I hope Hill and Rodríguez have plans to create more standalone stories like this in future.