The discovery of the keys is an ongoing pleasure of this series; I don't see that appeal fading anytime soon. It's a great storytelling hook to keep the readers engaged in the story.

Sometimes the clues are broad enough that you have a sense of what the newly discovered key will unlock, but sometimes, as with one of them in this volume, it's truly surprising. And what's not fun about being surprised in a creepy, spooky story like this one?

There are some horrific elements in this volume (though less blatant violence than in the first two volumes), but the emphasis in this volume is on the relationships built between the characters, new alliances and old ones tested/broken. And old fractures in familiar characters widen: the children's mother's continuing struggle to cope is vivid and sorrowful, all the more so because it's readily believable.

As a result, some of the spreads are very busy; on some pages, it seems as though there is as much dialogue as on the page of a standard novel, but when the conflict swells, the panels stretch and there are no words, just a single image on a series of pages, as the action intensifies.

One element of the first two volumes that I missed in this one, is the way that the titles for each individual comic were incorporated so slyly into the images, blurring the line between installments; not only was that a nice artistic flourish, but it reminds the reader that this is a story with a long arc, the separate installments only chapters.

Nonetheless, I will be racing to the fourth volume.