#WinterChills ‘Stay On The Line’ by Clay McLeod Chapman

About the book…

After a small coastal town is devastated by a hurricane, the survivors gravitate toward a long out-of-service payphone in hopes of talking out their grief and saying goodbye to loved ones, only for it to begin ringing on its own. As more townspeople answer the call, friends and family believed to have been lost to the storm begin searching for a way back home.

This novelette features several new illustrations by Trevor Henderson.

Published on July 30th in paperback and e-book formats by Shortwave Books, this novella not only packs a Clay sized punch, it is accompanied by these gorgeous illustrations which submerge you into the story further, punctuating each page of dialogue with black and white nightmare fuel, from a dreamscape not too far away…

A regular, common or garden phone booth becomes the focus of a town’s grief, where the symbology of the waves as the cause of tragedy as well as the waves of emotions crash uncontrollably over grief stricken families.

Loved ones denied the chance to say goodbye following the worst of occurrences, a natural disaster in the form of a hurricane, leaveing almost each and every household touched by loss, leap at the chance to have just one more conversation with the departed.

A phone booth, long considered out of use, begins to toll a bell.

But what happens when you answer?

And what price will it take to grant you this farewell wish?

A courageous woman,a grieving widow, Jenny, the opposite of the destructive female force of Hurricane Audrey appears to be the only one seeing through the seeming relief that each call gives, each ghost begging their left behind loved ones to ‘stay on the line’.

Will she be able to break the hold this seemingly supernatural phone line to the dead has on the town of Brandywine?

Clay is one of the absolute BEST at grief horror, -see his novel ‘What Kind Of Mother’ review  here for more on how perfectly he encapsulates parental and partner loss-and in this very short novella, he manages to sink a town, raise it, then level it off . You are left caring deeply for these characters whose love stories you carry with you, the transformative power of grief and the love which helps you move through it.

People often talk of the Kubler Ross stages of grief and apply them incorrectly to the living. It’s for the dying that they were categorised in order to try and come to terms with their diagnosis. As with this spectral phone line, the transitional state between married, and widowed is so movingly rendered from, to me, the right side of the fence, that this just reaffirms why Clay is a must read and must buy author. He takes you places which you may not initially want to go to but when you are there, you don’t mind at all.

About the author…

Clay McLeod Chapman is the creator of “‘The Pumpkin Pie Show’” and the author of ‘Rest Area’, Nothing Untoward, and The Tribe trilogy.

He is the co-author, with Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick, of the middle grade novel Wendell and Wild.

In the world of comics, Chapman’s work includes Lazaretto, Iron Fist: Phantom Limb, and Edge of Spiderverse.

Twitter @claycleod @TitanBooks

Links-http://claymcleodchapman.com/

About the illustrator…

Trevor Henderson is a Toronto-based illustrator and writer.

He most recently wrote and illustrated the middle-grade horror book ‘Scarewaves‘ for Scholastic.

His love of monsters, cryptids, ghosts and other horrible entities is enduring and vast. Whenever he is not drawing or writing horrible things, he is probably playing with his cat Boo.

Links-trevorhenderson.format.com 

Twitter @slimyswampghost

Links-https://shortwavepublishing.com/

Twitter @ShortwaveBooks