New Release: A 15-Minute Read That Infiltrates Your Psyche

S tay on the Line by Clay McLeod Chapman with Illustrations by Trevor HendersonSynopsis

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.

Release Date

July 30, 2024

Shortwave Publishing

Overall Rating

5/5

Spooky Rating

3/5

Quick Take

Clay McLeod Chapman is quickly becoming one of my favorite horror authors! Stay on the Line is a chapbook that he created with Trevor Henderson and is at most a 15-minute read; however, every single word is intentional, there is no space for any kind of filler, and the concept was utterly brilliant. Twilight Zone fans rejoice! This one’s for you.

Tell Me More

“Your voice. I don’t even need to be on the line to hear you now. You’re in my head.”
—

For such a short piece of fiction (at around only 50 pages), I was impressed by how Stay on the Line packed a punch not only in horror but in grief. The concept reminded me a lot of one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, “Long Distance Call.” For those who haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil it for you, but it involves a young boy who is gifted a toy phone from his grandmother for his birthday and is able to communicate with her after she dies.

The novelette focuses on a small town that is deeply impacted by a hurricane, and one of the only things that remains is an out-of-service payphone. The people of the town begin using the phone as a way to verbalize their grief over their lost loved ones… but then the phone begins ringing on its own.

Clay perfectly married feelings of grief with an intense sense of dread. The story is perfectly paced and slowly escalates before crash landing and leaving the reader in a tailspin. It was a beautiful and scary take on how we experience grief and how letting go can be intensely painful. But how sometimes, we will do whatever we can to hang on, even to our own detriment. The story also highlighted the cost of grief and how our vulnerability during the process can be manipulated – a truly scary thought, and reality, in itself.

The illustrations were spectacular, and reminiscent of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which I thoroughly enjoyed. They are black and white and get bleaker as the story progresses. If ever there was a perfect chapbook, this is it.

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