Crown of Shadows sees Dodge becoming more aggressive in his search for the Omega Key. But with his attempts to push things forward come setbacks. Sam Lesser is still hanging around Keyhouse as a ghost, but is no longer inclined to help Dodge. When he tries to keep Kinsey isolated by ridiculing her new friends Jamal and Scot (the Quentin Quire or Spider Jerusalem lookalike I mentioned last week), it backfires because Kinsey doesn't fear losing social standing by hanging out with, gasp, uncool people, while Dodge can't manage the same. (Which is kind of funny, since he's supposed to be past that kind of thing.)
He manages to infiltrate the house again later and unlock the Crown of Shadows, but not only does this fail to get him the location of the Omega Key (because none of the Locke kids no where it is), he ends up losing the crown in a half-issue, all-splash page fight against a giant Tyler. Between that and Dodge using the crown to create a variety of shadow creatures, Rodriguez seems to be having a lot of fun in this mini-series. Dodge only barely gets away with the Wellhouse Key, but fails to reclaim the Head Key. (It also stiffens the resolve of Tyler and Kinsey to fight him off, even if they don't know the true face of their enemy.)
Unfortunately, the Locke family is doing a pretty good job messing themselves up by this point. Tyler's attempts to impress Jordan by letting her submit his ethics paper backfires, because just jamming the book in your skull doesn't bring comprehension of the material, or teach a person how to write a proper paper. Unless you also jammed a book on writing proper academic papers in there, too, but Tyler didn't. Kinsey's removal of her fear nearly gets herself and her best friend Jackie killed alongside Scot and Jamal by going to investigate something at the bottom of a rickety staircase in a water-filled cavern.
And their mother's use of alcohol to try and cope with her grief and loss comes to a head in a spectacularly uncomfortable sequence where she thinks she's successfully resurrected her husband, and instead is putting the moves on Tyler. That, was really an unpleasant scene to read on a lot of levels, but does lead to one important reveal.
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