It’s now devoured everything, and sometimes it seems that the only story we can tell is a story told through technology. The sun should go away and do other things rather than disturb them, like wake up ants or rush late schoolboys to start their day. Kurzum: keine cosy nostalgia, sondern ein Schauerroman, der mir beim Lesen deswegen große Freude beschert hat, weil er wirklich gut geschrieben ist und mit den Elementen des Genres geschickt spielt. It also reminded me a lot of Gary Gibson’s novella Ghost Frequencies, itself inspired by The Stone Tape, which is mentioned here as a favourite of Tim and Abi. I wondered if Will Maclean could pull all the disparate strains together and was gratified by a very accomplished ending.

The Apparition Phase Review – The Caffeinated Reader The Apparition Phase Review – The Caffeinated Reader

Part one is so good, meeting Tim and Abi as young teenagers, the observations and the whit almost perfect. The opening sentence of John Mullan’s richly readable study of Charles Dickens asks an intriguing question: ‘What is so good about Dickens’s novels?Did we look to the paranormal and fantastical in the spirit of “God, there’s got to be something more than this…”? I loved his ideas about cultural deceleration… the notion that culture hasn’t really moved on since about the mid-1990s. Their plan works rather too well: their classmate Janice is so terrified of the picture that she faints. I feel that the others made some very wise decisions which Tim did not, but I can understand his line of thinking. Some excellent pop references, Dr Who, The Stone Tapes and those brilliant Ghost Stories For Christmas that the BBC did, the influences are plain to see.

The Apparition Phase: Shortlisted for the 2021 McKitterick Prize The Apparition Phase: Shortlisted for the 2021 McKitterick Prize

No shocking thrills or OTT gruesome ugliness, just an all so very British ghost story based around a strong storyline which simply meanders along on its merry way to an unexplained possible source of absolute finality. Also, this is not just a busy month for me but I’ve been more absent as I keep abreast of the news and try to keep up with more important things, which means I’ll still be a bit sparse for now.Exemplified by the ghost that contacts the kids during the seance, Tobias Salt: nowadays, they’d just Google him to see whether he’d ever been a real person.

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I’m fanatical about books, especially rediscovering old second-hand books… and I think that comes over in The Apparition Phase, with Tim and Abi’s library. Maclean manages to imbue the whole concept with its rightful sense of dread and foreboding: it’s somehow worse to be the target of a malevolent entity which is entirely of your own invention. There is also one scene – in which Janice lashes out at the twins with what seems to be a prophecy or possession – which is truly chilling, almost cinematic in its intensity, and sure to remain lodged in the reader’s mind.

Later events only proved to become more focused on the supernatural, with an abundance of scenes directly focused on conversing with the dead, ensuring these feelings continued throughout. If you had a voice like that where I lived,” Tim adds, “you’d have to disguise it, coarsen it, keep the vowels sharp and the consonants rough, or simply learn to keep quiet, so as not to stand out. Yet, despite these reservations, I found it a gut-wrenching, spinetingling roller coaster of a ghost novel.

The Apparition Phase by Will Maclean | Goodreads

I just went: “You know what… I’m not going to send speculative scripts into BBC2 any more, because I’ve been doing that for seven years and it hasn’t got me anywhere. Britain has a great tradition of the rural weird and ghostly, and it makes sense that Tim in particular would think of Suffolk as “the country where M.Pacing is intense, I was on the edge of my seat from the moment Tim got to that manor until the end. There’s probably something on the floor of my house that was dropped three years ago, and I haven’t got round to picking it up yet. I went to the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden when the theatres re-opened for a while last September, and saw a play about a pandemic.