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The Apparition Phase: Shortlisted for the 2021 McKitterick Prize Hardcover – October 29, 2020

by Will Maclean (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 971 ratings
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SHORTLISTED FOR THE MCKITTERICK PRIZE 2021

'A delight for both the expert and the uninitiated, this creepy tale is a carapace of cosy nostalgia wrapped round a solid thread of dread ... A page turner that keeps you in dreaded suspense of what you are about to be shown ... A claustrophobic and entertaining read that left me breathless ... Horror for the connoisseur.' ALICE LOWE

'Hallucinatory brilliance ... The Apparition Phase may be the perfect novel for our phantom present.' GUARDIAN
___________________________________
Tim and Abi have always been different from their peers. Precociously bright, they spend their evenings in their parents' attic discussing the macabre and unexplained, zealously re-reading books on folklore, hauntings and the supernatural. In particular, they are obsessed with photographs of ghostly apparitions and the mix of terror and delight they provoke in their otherwise boring and safe childhoods.

But when Tim and Abi decide to fake a photo of a ghost to frighten an unpopular school friend, they set in motion a deadly and terrifying chain of events that neither of them could have predicted, and are forced to confront the possibility that what began as a callous prank might well have taken on a malevolent life of its own.

An unsettling literary ghost story set between a claustrophobic British suburban town and a menacing Suffolk manor, THE APPARITION PHASE is an unnerving novel, which, like all the best ghost stories, pushes us repeatedly over the line between rational explanation and inexplicable fear. It asks us to consider what might be lurking in the shadows, and questions what is real and what is simply a trick of the mind - and whether there's really a difference between the two.
___________________________________
'[T]his outstanding debut is ideal for fans of Andrew Michael Hurley.' METRO

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Previous page
  1. Print length
    406 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    William Heinemann
  4. Publication date
    October 29, 2020
  5. Dimensions
    5.67 x 1.42 x 8.78 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1785152378
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1785152375
  8. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Heinemann (October 29, 2020)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 406 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1785152378
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1785152375
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.67 x 1.42 x 8.78 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 971 ratings

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Will Maclean

Will Maclean

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Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
971 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Leightay
5.0 out of 5 stars What could happen when you look for ghosts?
Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2024
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Well written, intelligent, haunted and haunting. Did it begin with two young teens who decided to fake a ghostly photograph? Or was something always there following them? Did the psychologist scheme with the ghost hunter to bring a disturbed young man to a seance? Did they awaken a ghost from the past, summon a demonic spirit, or was it a cruel psychological experiment? The story is always interesting, sometimes frightening, and holds you to the end.
One person found this helpful
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Belligirl
4.0 out of 5 stars pretty Darn Good
Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2023
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First off, I would recommend this book to anyone who likes a good ghost story or supernatural thriller and the like. It ended rather poorly and that’s why I didn’t give it 5 stars. The beginning is fantastic and the writing style is excellent, very clever and very British. I just wish the ending was done with as much gusto as the beginning and middle of the story. Worth a read, unquestionably.
2 people found this helpful
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Elizabeth Little
5.0 out of 5 stars very Well Written
Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2024
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It is unusual to find this sort of psychological and creepy story in modern writing and so well done. Characters are expertly drawn.
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KatyaFHS
3.0 out of 5 stars I wanted to love this one more
Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2024
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I really enjoyed the story of Tim, his character, how he lived his pain... But the supernatural element took so long to be introduced and developed that it felt disconnected from the rest of the story. If you're looking for a scary book, this is not it.

The other thing that bothered me was how many things were left unresolved among the cast of characters. The payoff for all the wonderfully built suspense was unsatisfying, as was the ending, which was abrupt and a little meh.

This book has so much more potential. Like I said, I love Tim (except his bland, nondescript version in the epilogue). I loved him the most when he was angsty and felt like a real teenager out of control.

Bummer. The book is nicely written and is, in general, a great idea, but it was lacking in the end.
One person found this helpful
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Book-a-saurus
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best ghost stories I've ever read
Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2022
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Incredible writing that perfectly captures feelings of unease and things going on around you that are beyond your ability to understand, much less control.
6 people found this helpful
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Antigone
5.0 out of 5 stars Nostalgic page turner
Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2022
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I loved it.
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Jeanva1jean
3.0 out of 5 stars The Apparition Phase
Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2022
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This book started off fast, fun, and spooky. Then it began to plateau where it stayed to the end. Comfortable writing. Intriguing story line.
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C. T.
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic and Haunting
Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2022
A perfect read for fans of everything paranormal. The way so many plot lines intersected was fantastic. I found myself often looking back to see how things were connecting. I wish I could read it again for the first time.
2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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C.F. Walker-Watson
4.0 out of 5 stars What a great story!
Reviewed in Canada on January 21, 2024
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It has been quite a while since I enjoyed a ghost story this much. I will be watching out for more from this author.
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Eric Faragher
5.0 out of 5 stars The Void Stares Back
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 11, 2024
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A top class novel by a top class writer. I would say this work falls into the M R James type, in that the concentration is on the oblique reference, the key word or happening or “coincidence” which chips away at certainty and gives rise to a sense of eeriness and unease. Like James, there’s a sense of hidden rocks under the cushions. To maintain this sense of unseen and unknown powers beneath the mundane, over the length of novel rather than a short story, is quite extraordinary, but the author has definitely achieved it with what is a tour de force in the genre. The theme might best be described as an investigation of the uncertain borderland between the supernatural and the psychological, and how events in the one or the other are generated or created and subsequently interact with everyday reality. Any knowledge gained is necessarily vague and therefore mysterious. The shocks and horrors are also vague, hidden; at first unable to manifest in the real world save indirectly. The final stage is given in the novel’s title.

“Who is this who is coming?” springs to my mind as the briefest of summing’s up.

The remarkable path from an innocent and playful fascination with the unknown by children on the verge of adulthood, leading to the fun prank, the “hoax” which gains sudden reality and leads on to disappearance and disaster and yet further curiosity and further punishment, is traced in a subtle, convincing way which evokes the spirit of the 1970s; times following the moon landing, when the possibility of science solving all mysteries and revealing everything to enquiring young minds seemed very real, very close and very obvious. But such optimistic certainty rolls downhill as the story progresses, showing us that the very minds that are so curious to know are the most mysterious things of all.

This is a book rich in possible interpretation, dense with themes and possibilities, and yet also a book of down to earth human experience (and nostalgia, for the older reader, like myself). The writing is technically flawless, the handling of the plot excellent, the establishment of place and time is swiftly and expertly accomplished. The James technique of hints is exploited and the reader is often invited into the creative process with a remarkable artistic assurance that assumes the intelligent reader and generates an intimate sense of closeness and empathy with the characters, and therefore the reality of the events, which is too often missing from the usual blood and gore that we are customarily treated to these days. This is a story of suspense, mystery, strangeness, and a horror which is beyond violence because it reaches the soul.

If you stare long enough into the void, the void stares back.

As is usual with Penguin the kindle edition text is correctly formatted and properly proof-read. It shouldn’t be necessary to say this, but so many publishers don’t appear to bother with such fundamental basics, whereas Penguin has never let me down and I feel that Penguin’s elementary care and attention should be acknowledged because it is so carelessly ignored by too many other publishers.
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Amazon Kunde
5.0 out of 5 stars Großartige Unterhaltung für Freunde "klassischen Grusels"!
Reviewed in Germany on November 9, 2022
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Das Buch ist im Gesamtbild der Handlung, in der Art der Sprache wie im Detail der Szenen herausragend in seiner Qualität, und man wünscht sich solches mehr von dem Autor beim "nächsten Mal" wieder...!
Es ist dieses Niveau des wohligen Schauers, welches Leitstern sein sollte für das Genre - fern vom Gore und Sadismus wie ihn etwa die Filmwelt und gewisse andere Autoren leider pflegen!
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Salvatore
4.0 out of 5 stars Splendida storia di fantasmi
Reviewed in Italy on January 15, 2021
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Da leggere assolutamente per tutti gli appassionati di storie di fantasmi e atmosfere gotiche.
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G. L. Wilson
4.0 out of 5 stars Good story with dodgy period detail
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2021
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I desperately wanted to give this book five stars because from reading the recent review in Fortean Times it appeared to tick all the boxes for me. And the story is very good, it kept me guessing and it kept me page turning and going on to read "just one more chapter".

However, it does feel like Maclean is jumping on the Hauntology bandwagon here (he'd hardly be the first and most definitely won't be the last). I don't know how old Maclean is but the whole 1970s setting feels forced and - to put it bluntly - wrong.

There's some minor niggling little things - idioms of speech such as the dreadful modern practice of beginning a statement with the word "So" which sounds really incongruous in a 1970s setting. Elsewhere the narrator uses the word "trillions" - in the early 1970s the billion hadn't been de-valued by the Americans to mean 1.000,000,000 (one thousand million), rather it meant the mathematically correct 1,000,000,000,000 (one million million) which is now what economists call one trillion. The narrator mentions Doctor Who several times, if he watched some of the those early 1970s episodes (e.g. Doctor Who and The Silurians) he would hear the Doctor talking about units of power in terms of "thousand millions". The word "trillion" wasn't unheard of, but in those days millions and billions were huge enough already for our needs when trying to communicate an arbitrary large quantity of something and more likely to be used than "trillion".

Speaking of numbers brings me neatly to money. For reasons I won't divulge, Tim (the narrator) has taken a year off school and doesn't have a job. Where does he continually find all this money from that allows him to take lengthy train journeys around the south east? At one point he mentions not having been able to afford "expensive" books costing £4.00 and £4.25 but yet he seems to have plenty of ready cash to buy drugs, alcohol and for Intercity rail tickets.

Yes, I'm nit-picking but together all these little things conspire against the suspension of disbelief.

Here's another. Given Neil's character traits - highly intelligent, logical, rational, sarcastic, obsessive - today we might say he was "on the spectrum" - there is no way he would need to ask "Who's that spoon-bending weirdo, the one who's all over the telly? What's his name?" He would KNOW it was Uri Geller.

As for Graham having to be persuaded not to fetch his ukulele. The ukulele was popular in the 1950s and has had a renaissance at around the start of the 21st Century, but it was definitely not a popular instrument in the 1970s. It is not impossible that Graham could have had one, but it is unlikely and it is a detail that doesn't help anchor the story in the early 1970s.

All this sounds like I didn't like the book. I did and I'm giving it 4 stars. But it loses a star for the unconvincing period detail.
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G. L. Wilson
4.0 out of 5 stars Good story with dodgy period detail
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2021
I desperately wanted to give this book five stars because from reading the recent review in Fortean Times it appeared to tick all the boxes for me. And the story is very good, it kept me guessing and it kept me page turning and going on to read "just one more chapter".

However, it does feel like Maclean is jumping on the Hauntology bandwagon here (he'd hardly be the first and most definitely won't be the last). I don't know how old Maclean is but the whole 1970s setting feels forced and - to put it bluntly - wrong.

There's some minor niggling little things - idioms of speech such as the dreadful modern practice of beginning a statement with the word "So" which sounds really incongruous in a 1970s setting. Elsewhere the narrator uses the word "trillions" - in the early 1970s the billion hadn't been de-valued by the Americans to mean 1.000,000,000 (one thousand million), rather it meant the mathematically correct 1,000,000,000,000 (one million million) which is now what economists call one trillion. The narrator mentions Doctor Who several times, if he watched some of the those early 1970s episodes (e.g. Doctor Who and The Silurians) he would hear the Doctor talking about units of power in terms of "thousand millions". The word "trillion" wasn't unheard of, but in those days millions and billions were huge enough already for our needs when trying to communicate an arbitrary large quantity of something and more likely to be used than "trillion".

Speaking of numbers brings me neatly to money. For reasons I won't divulge, Tim (the narrator) has taken a year off school and doesn't have a job. Where does he continually find all this money from that allows him to take lengthy train journeys around the south east? At one point he mentions not having been able to afford "expensive" books costing £4.00 and £4.25 but yet he seems to have plenty of ready cash to buy drugs, alcohol and for Intercity rail tickets.

Yes, I'm nit-picking but together all these little things conspire against the suspension of disbelief.

Here's another. Given Neil's character traits - highly intelligent, logical, rational, sarcastic, obsessive - today we might say he was "on the spectrum" - there is no way he would need to ask "Who's that spoon-bending weirdo, the one who's all over the telly? What's his name?" He would KNOW it was Uri Geller.

As for Graham having to be persuaded not to fetch his ukulele. The ukulele was popular in the 1950s and has had a renaissance at around the start of the 21st Century, but it was definitely not a popular instrument in the 1970s. It is not impossible that Graham could have had one, but it is unlikely and it is a detail that doesn't help anchor the story in the early 1970s.

All this sounds like I didn't like the book. I did and I'm giving it 4 stars. But it loses a star for the unconvincing period detail.
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