Keyhole

by Matthew G. Rees

Several writers, Arthur Machen among them, have spoken of their certainty of our co-existence with another world – one that we are close to in our daily lives and from which we are separated by the finest partition; a place of ancient forces and wisdom, and darker, more peculiar things.

In his collection of short stories, Keyhole, Matthew G. Rees takes us through that divide and acquaints us with the places and inhabitants of this other world. Yet his stories aren’t mere escapism for their roots remain in our own recognisable universe. And it is here that we keep a foothold, sometimes only a fingerhold, as we reach into and explore the other. So it is that Rees’s eighteen extraordinary stories take us from strange seashores, across ragged farms, along eerie waterways and over mist-shrouded mountains, to altered small towns and one-time heartlands of industry where the mining has stopped and the quarries stand still.

While Keyhole represents his first collection, Matthew G. Rees has been described as an unusually talented and inventive writer. The word ‘masterpiece’ has been applied to one of his previous tales. As well as writing short stories, he is a scholar of the form and has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Swansea. Although having his own ‘voice’ and employing modern settings, readers might detect a lineage with such writers as Arthur Machen, Glyn Jones and Roald Dahl. The British literary and cinematic tradition of ‘folk horror’ can also be seen in his work.

Matthew G. Rees grew up in a Welsh family in the border country between England and Wales known as the Marches. His early career was in journalism. Later he entered teaching, working for a while in Moscow. Diverse other employment has included time as a taxi driver where he found that the shift that he preferred was at night.

269 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

between a 4 and a 4.5
full post here
http://www.oddlyweirdfiction.com/2021...


The first clue as to what lies in wait for the reader comes before a single page is turned an epigraph from Arthur Machen's The London Adventure:

"...the unspoken world is, in truth, about us everywhere, everywhere near to our feet; the thinnest veil separates us from it, the door in the wall of the next street communicates with it."

In Keyhole it's not London, but rather Wales where the unsuspecting may just happen to slip through that same "thinnest veil" between this world and the other.

Rees' choice of opening story is perfect, and clearly sets the tone for the rest of these tales; it is through the eyes of his characters that we get a view of their respective worlds within the borders of Wales. In "Keyhole," the mother of a young girl named Bronte with a "condition that meant she had to be kept from the light" finds a way to brighten her daughter's life by introducing kingfishers into the confined environment of the family home Fosse, complete with "reeded moat." They are released "to the light" every other day, young Bronte following their flight out of the conservatory's French windows via an arrangement of doors and keyholes. Years later, returning home, Clive Theaxton makes straight away for Bronte's home, but finds everything strangely different. Let's just say we're only one story done at this point, but dark, disturbing and thoroughly discombobulating, I knew I had a winner of a book here. I wasn't wrong.

The remainder of these stories are also quite good, quite unlike anything I've read, and are set in what seem to be normal locales to the outsider. The closer you get, however, the stranger things become -- for example, a pub that appears and disappears, a mine complete with its own set of ghostly horses, an old wartime submarine discovered under the sands, crew and all, ready for their mission... on and on goes the weirdness.

As the back-cover blurb notes, "Keyhole is a dark world where extraordinary stories gleam." In an interview with the author , he notes that in this book,

"Wales is not seen in a literal way, as if captured by a camera. Instead, it is quite often viewed at a slant ... presented askew."

True as that statement might be, the visions offered of Wales here capture the seasons, the weather, the people and the landscape; it is a place where time gone by bleeds into the present and quite often magic presents itself in many different forms. In that same interview, the author says that his intention is that the reader "always keep one foot in our own recognisable world," while "tentatively stepping into another, adjoining world." No disappointments here at all. As with any other collection of stories, there are some that range from the great zone and move on down, but there is not one in the bunch that I didn't like; among the darkest of these you will also find some that will bring on a bit of a chuckle. An absolutely wonderful collection of stories that I enjoyed so much that I bought another book by the same author just a few stories into this one.

With only a few minor exceptions, I've had a fantastic weird reading year, and Keyhole just made it better. Considering I'd never heard of this author before Halloween, well, that tells you what you need to know. So good, and recommended for sure.

[Seregil of Rhiminee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally published at Risingshadow.

Matthew G. Rees' Keyhole is a masterpiece of literary speculative fiction. Beautiful prose and weird fiction elements collide and clash with each other in a highly enjoyable way in this collection. As a fan of literary speculative fiction (and especially literary strange fiction), I declare this collection one of the best short story collections I've ever had the pleasure of reading. I'm glad I had an opportunity to read this book, because it has everything I expect from litery speculative fiction and weird tales.

In my opinion, this collection is a prime example of why we need small independent publishers who are willing to publish quality fiction. The publisher - Three Impostors - has done a favour to lovers of literary speculative fiction by publishing this book, because it's excellent and compelling in every regard due to the author's elegant prose and sense of style.

There's something charmingly old-fashioned yet modern about this collection that fascinates me, because the author beautifully combines classic storytelling with modern and surreal elements. In these stories, the mundane and the unexpected intertwine in a pleasingly captivating and unsettling way.

Keyhole contains the following eighteen stories:

- Keyhole
- The Service at Plas Trewe
- Rain
- Dragon Hounds
- I've Got You
- Horsemen
- Bluecoat
- The Press
- Driftwood
- The Lock
- Queen Bee
- The Griffin
- The Comfort
- Bait Pump
- The Dive
- Sand Dancer
- The Word
- The Cheese

All of these stories are set in Wales. I found myself amazed by how effortlessly the author creates a sense of place and time in them that it felt almost as if he is writing a literary love letter to Wales and its rural beauty and shows his appreciation to an old way of life that is about to be swallowed by modern times. The unsettling atmosphere, which is enhanced by descriptions of decaying locales and beautiful yet bleak landscapes, is ever present in these stories.

Some of these stories are light-hearted while others are eerie and unsettling. I noticed that a couple of the stories are slightly less impressive than others, but despite the minor fluctuation in quality between the stories, all of them are fascinating and worth reading.

I was surprised to find photographs in this collection, because this kind of collections don't normally have any kind of photographs. Each of the stories has it own photograph, which serves as a kind of an appetiser to the contents of the story. These photographs have been taken by the author in Wales and the Marches, which is an area along the border between England and Wales.

Here are a few words about some of the stories and my brief thoughts about them:

This collection opens with the excellent "Keyhole", which tells of Theaxton who returns to his home town and yearns to see Brontë, who has been forced to keep herself hidden from sunlight due to her condition. I found this story compelling and was mesmerised by its elements of loss and yearning.

"The Service at Plas Trewe" takes places at a hotel called Plas Trewe where the narrator of the story works and acts as an under-manager. He has journeyed there and has become a successful hotelier. I enjoyed this story very much and was captivated by how fascinatingly the author writes about the narrator and his life.

In "Bluecoat", the past and the present become intriguingly entwined as a couple moves into a farm and the wife becomes fascinated by the old mansion that used to be a hospital during the war. This is a compelling and memorable story, because it's beautifully written and the events are captivating.

"Driftwood" tells of Davies and Susan whose friend Brynley Baines goes to the beach and sits on a log in the nude. The log is a massive tree that has somehow been hefted ashore by high tide. I was pleased with this story, because it's something different and the ending works well.

In "Queen Bee", Owen Roberts and his bees have found a perfect home on the grasslands of the peninsula, because both he and his bees are happy there. Soon Owen finds out that the celebrated and respected beekeeper Hywel Rhydderch lives near Owen's new home. I found this story pleasantly entertaining and twisted, because the author writes fluently about what happens between to the beekeepers and how their professional relationship comes to an end. The final sentence of this story reminded me slightly of Rhys Hughes, because it had the kind of stinging sharpness that can be found in his stories.

"The Comfort" is one of the stories that truly impressed me. It's a story about Harris, an elderly man, who fixes an abandoned house. I enjoyed the author's way of writing about the man's life and the old house, because his descriptions are evocative.

"The Dive" is a fascinating and relatively short story. It tells of Price whose finger is stuck in the grid at the bottom of the main pool at the town baths. It was interesting to read about Price's predicament and what kind of thoughts went through his mind.

The final story, "The Cheese", is an excellent and memorable story about a writer who meets the eccentric cheese correspondent of Llanymaen Evening Mail and finds herself being unable to get rid of him. The ending of this story is satisfyingly strange and approriately chilling.

Many of the characters in the author's stories are individuals who are haunted by their pasts and certain events that occured in their childhoods. They seem to try to grasp at a better life and travel from the city to the countryside or return to their roots.

I was mesmerised by the author's successful use of time shifts and surrealism, because the present and the past seem to become intertwined in many stories. These scenes can occasionally feel slightly bewildering and strange, but they are effective and lend a sense of additional weirdness and otherness to the stories.

The author's gentle use of quiet horror and weird elements is admirable. When I read this collection, I noticed how easily he created a sense of something strange going on and never underestimated the reader's intelligence. This kind of storytelling appeals to me, because I appreciate authors who don't underline anything, but let the reader work certain things out for themselves. To get the most out of this collection, I strongly suggest readers to read each of the stories carefully and without hurry, because the stories benefit from this kind of reading.

One of the things why I love this collection is the author's beautiful and often almost lyrical prose. Matthew G. Rees writes atmospheric, nuanced and elegant prose that is a pleasure to read. He is an excellent storyteller who effortlessly creates a captivating and eerie atmosphere that lures the reader into his fiction's compelling world where anything can happen.

If you've ever read any stories by Arthur Machen, M.R. James, Robert Aickman, Edgar Allan Poe and Joel Lane, you'll love Matthew G. Rees' stories and prose, because his stories are slightly reminiscent of these authors' stories and writing styles. There's something fascinatingly Aickmanesque, Machenesque and Jamesian yet modern about the stories that I find highly compelling. I think that this collection will also attract the attention of readers who enjoy stories by Nina Allan and Rhys Hughes.

Here are my final words:

Matthew G. Rees' Keyhole is a beautifully written short story collection that deserves to be read and experienced. It contains amazing and atmospheric stories that will impress the reader. If you have a yearning to read something different, eerie and compelling, you won't be disappointed by this collection.

Highly recommended!

[Keith Davies · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of short stories - which stay with you: magical, funny, enthralling; with richly-detailed landscapes and interiors which, as a Welshman I recognized: bleak, mean towns, remote, rainswept farms. Poetic, exploring Edgelands, liminal places, elements of Folk Horror - the stories are by turns dark, poignant, whimsical, even hilarious, always exploding imaginative horizons.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review originally published at The Wales Arts Review: https://www.walesartsreview.org/books...

A girl who can’t go outside in the sun watches the world through a keyhole. What does she see? A man returning to the place where he grew up to find it haunted by the past; but who is it that’s really haunted, place or man? A woman, her young son and a strange family made of shells. A well that promises to be a family’s salvation during a drought, but whose promise may turn out to be poison. Or a child who’s fascinated by the horses that live around his small mining village. What does she see? All this and more…

The late 19th – early 20th century Welsh author Arthur Machen (the pen-name of Arthur Llewellyn Jones), who is best known for his supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction – and whose horror novel The Three Imposters (or The Transmutations) the Newport-based independent press who have published Keyhole is named after – was one of many who spoke of a certainty of our co-existence with another world, a world of ancient forces and dark, peculiar things, separated from ours by only the thinnest of veils. And this can definitely be seen in the stories in Keyhole, Matthew G. Rees’s debut short story collection. Rees “grew up in a Welsh family in the border country between England and Wales known as the Marches.” Coincidentally, a liminal quality is the collection’s defining trait. Though the characters and events in the stories are often strange or bizarre, the settings are realistic: rural farms and villages, a house by the sea, a guesthouse, disused industrial landscapes etc. But they are often isolated, in-between places, and therefore easy to present or utilise in a way that highlights their eeriness and adds to the stories’ sense of the uncanny, in a way comparable to or reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected.

The otherworldliness/eeriness is typically presented/highlighted narratively in one of three ways. Firstly, through plot. For example, the title story, ‘Keyhole’, starts out by telling us of Bronte Vaughan, the girl whose condition prevents her from going outside and how she observes the outside world through keyholes and through a bronze telescope. Then the point of view switches to that of Theaxton, a resident of the town where Bronte’s home is located, and who is returning home, in part in hopes of seeing Bronte again. Things become increasingly strange as the present and past seems to blend together, before returning to the image of an eye watching through a keyhole, implying that Theaxton, and the town, are being observed like a specimen in a petri dish.

Secondly, through character. The narrator in ‘The Service at Plas Trew’, for instance, starts out genial, but his geniality becomes unnerving when he reveals disturbing details in the same manner, including how he just casually took over from the owner of the previous hotel/boarding house he was at after her stroke.

And lastly, through setting. ‘Rain’ is set on an isolated farmstead that a drought renders increasingly barren. The narrator’s father finds a well but the water kills the animals who drink it and makes the grown-ups ill. The parents had taken their children to the farm as a promise to get away from the corrupting status quo of society, only for that promise to turn to literal poison, and the increasingly inhospitableness of the landscape serves to amplify the atmosphere.

This is all, of course, enhanced by beautiful writing throughout. Take this from the opening passages of ‘Keyhole’ for instance:

Bronte Vaughan had a condition that meant she had to be kept from the light. In order that her shuttered world was not entirely without illumination her mother presented her with a Kingfisher… In time her mother… gave Bronte another and another of the birds… The birds swirled in shoals around young Bronte’s white hair and head… her mother would usher the kingfishers, carouselling around her in a sapphire-and-amber whirl, from one room to the next until she and they had reached the conservatory of citrus trees that ran along the manor’s southerly side. There she would throw open its French windows enabling the birds to issue forth in a wondrous fusillade over the reeded moat that teemed with small fish and was populated with water beetles, springtails and other bugs, and danced over by the most lovely and delicate damsel flies in bright bodices of blues and yellows and reds.

Keyhole is Rees’s debut short story collection, (having previously had fiction published in various publications, and a fantasy-comedy play – Dragonfly), and it is a wonderfully accomplished one, both generally and within the tradition/genre of strange fiction, demonstrating his skill with the short story format. If he were ever in the future to try his hand at a full-length novel, the result would undoubtedly be one worth investigating.

[Andrew Hodges · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent collection of short stories dealing with the surreal and supernatural, all showcasing the beauteous country of Wales. At times disturbing, often unsettling, and always full of dark touches, each story takes its reader into the lives of characters who feel real in their flaws and piteous in the bizarre circumstances they find themselves. Matt Rees utilizes his knowledge of both nature and Welsh culture well in weaving narratives that center around settings that come alive on the page. While some of these tales are better than others, every single one drew me in and gave me plenty to ponder. A few of them even mandated a re-read following my initial perusal: some of these are bizarre indeed, with shades of Franz Kafka, Ramsey Campbell, and Anton Chekhov all blended together. Many take place on the Welsh coast or in the farm-riddled countryside, places that Mr. Rees's wondrous narrative fills with magic and possibility. Anglophiles, horror fanatics, and fans of the bizarre will all find something to love in this excellent collection by a talented master of unsettling prose.

[theshortstory.co.uk (TSS Publishing)]

"... at his best Rees has original ideas and an incredible command of style. His great stories are refreshingly different, he paints a startling and detailed portrait of a world slightly askew, and he knows how to cast a spell with a sentence..."

Read Kate Tyte's full review at: https://theshortstory.co.uk/short-sto...

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wouldn't want to give anything away in this review, other than to say this collection of the surreal, supernatural and strange is brilliant.

[Peter Kenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Modulating beautifully through passages of horror, humour and the supernatural Matthew G. Rees collection Keyhole is a hugely enjoyable collection of short stories. They juxtapose a grainy matter-of-factness that moves the narrative briskly along, with tantalising glimpses of a deep and timeless magic that seems rooted in Wales.

Some are of these dark stories I found hilarious (a tough thing to pull off) such as The Cheese, which features the appalling cheese correspondent of the Llanymaen Evening Mail who inflicts the ultimate cheese nightmare on an unsuccessful author. While in The Griffin, the familiar feeling that you have lost the pub you are looking for, becomes a grimly amusing meditation of the slipperiness of time and space.

There is an unsentimental bleakness in these stories too, which are populated by haunted, isolated characters. Where there is horror it is often inflected with magic and ambiguity. In Sand Dancer an old man with a metal detector finds a fully crewed WW2 U-boat buried under the sand, he frees them and sets off with them, with disastrous consequences. While in I’ve got you, a family made from shells emerge from the sea to menace the mother and son who find them. They call the shell man, Percy Shelley. ‘Mr Shelley went after him, the whites of his rotating razor fingers glinting in the dark.’

Wales is everywhere in these stories, from the wet slate of misty hillsides to the bait diggers on the coast. This genius loci gives these stories heart and cohesion, and a concreteness that balances the dreamlike passages.

Keyhole the eponymous opening story is magnificent. Flecks of of dark fairy tale mix with a middle aged man’s crisis as he returns to his childhood home. We are introduced to a child, Brontë Vaughan, who ‘had a condition that meant she had to be kept from the light,’ confined in a house called The Fosse. Her mother, presents her with a kingfisher.

"In her time her mother, a woman of great beauty grieved by her conviction that in bringing her into this world she had cursed her child, gave Brontë another and another of the birds. These mated and reproduced so that their number, swarming through the dark chambers of the old house, came to defy calculation. The birds swirled in shoals around young Brontë’s white hair and head. They clustered on mantels, perched on clock cases, their droppings striating curtains that were seldom if ever opened and flecking large, hanging tapestries that showed harts running into deep forests behind whose think and faded fabric the walls of The Fosse stood powdery and damp."

Lushly imaginative, lyrical, full of intriguing ambiguities and surprisingly funny interludes, Keyhole, is a wonderful collection I’m busy recommending to friends.