I Hear The Clattering of the Keys by Jamie Stewart
Blood Rites Horror (November 2021)
175 pages; $7.99 paperback ; $2.99 ebook
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
In the past, when I’ve read horror short story collections, I’ve found them a bit insular; they’re always too fast, and the payoff isn’t consistent.
I Hear The Clattering of the Keys is a horrific web of tragedy, love, and the supernatural — a complete antithesis of what’s turned me off to short stories in the past.
From the start, Jamie Stewart sets readers just out of reach of a hungry beast, its sharp salient teeth snarling and ready to snap. Then comes this intrusive thought: you have to go around it and only hope the carrion air is enough to throw the creature off your scent.
The first two stories in the collection, “Dead Air” and “Insular,” are two of Stewart’s more notable. However, “Trick or Treat” awoke me from the haunting stoic state the previous narratives had induced.
“Trick or Treat,” contorted with loss, possession, revenge, and a murderous, wraithlike being, dovetailed with the likes of Adam L.G. Nevill.
“Alfie & The Dead Girls” is every parents’ worst nightmare. The terrifying factor of this story is that the monster is human. I know that sounds cliché, but it’s so eerily prominent here through innocent friendship, a strange man assuring he’s a trusted adult, accordioned with cunning, wicked intentions. That vile, hair-raising fact is damn near unshakeable.
This story immediately made me think of Stephen King’s The Outsider, and the antagonist’s animalistic, teasing tone echoes the Ted Bundy case.
I Hear the Clattering of the Keys is a guttural, heart-pounding collection that pursues the haunting notion that in casual choices, everyday happenstance, catastrophe metastasizes in all its bloody bravado.
Stewart has something for every reader in this one — religious horror, supernatural, revenge stories, murder mysteries, occult, and so much more.
