The Apparition Phase

Suburbia in the early seventies, twins Tim and Abi live in a world mostly of their own making. One in which they can pursue their interest in folklore, the unexplained and apparitions. Obsessed with photographs that, allegedly, show ghostly figures they fake one of their own and use it to frighten a girl at their school. A prank that backfires when her reaction sets off a chain of events that will take them both to somewhere very dark indeed.

Will Maclean’s first novel will strike a chord with any reader who, as the current reviewer did, spent a significant part of their early adolescence obsessing over all things spooky. He touches all the required bases, referencing M.R James, classic TV shows like The Stone Tape and unorthodox psychological experiments carried out in creepy stately homes.

He also shows a gift for invoking the claustrophobic strangeness of suburban life during the period, a time when though things might be falling apart a front of continued normality had to be maintained at all costs. An apt metaphor for a Britain where the post war consensus is rapidly collapsing, and the Age of Aquarius is morphing into the winter of discontent.

This suggests another writer Maclean’s characters don’t reference, but with whom they and he are surely familiar, Robert Aickman. In this novel, as in his supremely unsettling short stories, the subtext to the supernatural goings on is as much about the characters confronting their own trauma and alienation, as encountering things that go bump in the night.

This is a brilliantly atmospheric novel that transcends the simplistic shocks and scares of the horror genre, and the need for crime writing, to which it also has a tangential link to provide tidy solutions. Instead, it is one that manages to find a psychological darkness and an unsettling hint of the truly strange behind those things the rational mind tries to reassure us are just so much superstition.