The Apparition Phase: Shortlisted for the 2021 McKitterick Prize

Teenage twins Tim and Abi Smith growing up in the early 1970s are obsessed with the paranormal, ghosts, standing stones, witches, curses, etc. After faking a photo of a ghost in their attic bad stuff starts to happen. The Apparition Phase (2022) opens in an unassuming and unremarkable small town milieu but before long Tim is living with a bunch of hippy paranormal researchers in a big old haunted house in the Suffolk countryside.In addition to being an increasingly creepy tale there's a fun evocation of the early 1970s and a very English sensibility which also embraces the class structure and British attitudes to grief. I wondered if Will Maclean could pull all the disparate strains together and was gratified by a very accomplished ending. If you remember the 1970s you'll get even more from this novel. I'm a sucker for weird England stories but, putting that to one side, there's still plenty for most readers to enjoy and appreciate. It may all be slightly silly but it's also a genuinely unsettling book about twins, chaos, loss, mental health, grief, memory, the 1970s, hallucination, hysteria, and hauntology.

What a brilliant, brilliant book! It is not a horror story per se - as in a classic ghost story - but a very elegant exercise on the theme, which also has one of the most shocking finales in literature. Unfortunately, numerous reviews are mostly wide of the mark and miss key points. Yes, it is about teenage angst and class and growing up in the seventies but it is, first and foremost, about a formation of a character but then it id also about the horrors unleashed by a traumatised psyche. Lots of clues spread around the text, lots of guesses to be made, tension, anticipation, devastation, betrayal and, finally, a terrifying epilogue, which reveals an abyss of a human tragedy.

In his debut novel Will Maclean transports us back to the early 1970's and the insular world of two teenagers. Abi and Tim Smith are twins, precocious, aloof and intellectually superior to their peers, they have little in common with other kids and no real friends apart from each other. This may make them sound unpleasant but they are not. The eccentric twins have an attic room as their own space. Here they have created a library of fortean book and a collection of weird objects. Abi and Tim are obsessed by ghosts, hauntings, monsters, folklore, Doctor Who, man-eating animals, Vikings and other off-beat subjects. Reading this as a fortean, classic Doctor Who fan and child of the 70s , I saw myself looking back at me in the form of Abi and Tim.The Apparition Phase is redolent of forteana and the early 1970s with many references to both in a meticulously re-created period piece. As a member of Generation X, I can vouch that Will Maclean has done his homework, the first part of the book in particular is like stepping into a tine machine. The twins are 13 when we first meet them so they have a good few years on me but the world they inhabit is one i recognize and recall well. Nationwide, The Stone Tape, Doctor Who (Autons and Metebelis Spiders mentioned) and the wonderful BBC adaptations of the works of M R James are all alluded to. Their world is chock full of fortean references such as Gef the talking mongoose, the Borley Rectory haunting and the 'Philip' experiment to name but a few.Abi and Tim feel stifled in their home in suburban London and plan to liven things up a bit. As soon as they get their hands on a camera they decide to fake a ghost photograph to scare their schoolmates. The pair look at the three best know ghost photographs, the hooded figure on the Tulip Staircase at the Queen's House in Greenwich, the Chinnery photograph they supposedly showed a dead mother in law, complete with blank glowing eyes in the back seat of a car and most scary of all the towering,faceless phantom monk snapped at The Church of Christ the Consoler, Skelton -cum-Newby in Yorkshire. The latter seemed to have influenced them the most as they create a seven foot, monk like figure in chalk on the wall of their attic, blurring the edges to give it a more etheric feel. Experimenting with various lighting and angles they take a series of photographs then select the most convincing.A seemingly dull schoolmate, another loner called Janice Tupp is selected as the victim for their prank. Janice's reaction is a violent one. She is badly scared and ends up collapsing and cutting her head on a desk as she falls. Abi and Tim, in a fit of remorse decide to tell her the whole thing was a fake and invite her over to their house for tea. In the attic, despite their protests otherwise, Janice insists that they have photographed a ghost, or something that will become one. They have set something free and given it shape. She then seems to go into a trance making eerie predictions about a broken house full of broken people and a man with eyes but no face.The Apparition Phase is very much a book of two haves. Both complement each other and both make a pleasing whole. The second half of the book focuses on Tim as he grows older. Tim becomes embroiled in an ongoing investigation into a haunted house in a rural Suffolk village. The experiments are led by the hippyish Graham Shaw (whom I visualized as looking somewhat like Graham Garden of The Goodies) and his voluptuous new age assistant Sally. A number of other young people are taking part, Sebastian and Juliet a seemingly perfect couple, Polly, a shy cardigan wearing girl and Neil, a sardonic and acerbic character. As it turns out all of them are emotionally damaged in some way.The house itself, Yarlings, is a hybrid place Jacobian in origin but with a wildly clashing Victorian wing. The building was once home to an infamous witch finder Tobias Salt who was himself secretly a witch and the head a satanic coven. He supposedly murdered both his wife and daughter.Tim's joining the group seems to trigger something. Before there was no hint of anything strange now at seances tables are rapped and moved, strange crashes are heard upstairs along with heavy foot falls. Things grow steadily more insistent and more creepy. An entity apparently begins to communicate to the group via a pencil mounted on a planchette. The messages seem to be mis-spelled nonsense at first but soon grow in legibility and impact as if the thing is learning how to use the planchette.A chance encounter with a second hand book seller and armature historian in the village sows seeds of doubt in Tim's mind and it seems that the experiments may not be all they seem.Back at Yarlings the entity the group have contacted seems to be growing in power and it seems to know the darkest secrets of all involved and uses them to turn the group against each other. The book comes to a shattering crescendo when a thing of utter malevolence breaks free. The book here feels like the hybrid offspring of M.R James' most disturbing stories and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.In short The Apparition Phase is a truly tremendous book, nostalgic, scary, moving, horrific, tragic and thrilling.There is an epilogue when Tim, in the modern day returns to Yarlings, now an old people's home with his elderly father. The final line of the novel is one of the most unsettling ever committed to paper.10 /10

I wanted to give this book 5 stars as early as a few pages in. Having held off, just in case I was mistaken, I can happily give those stars now. I could have read this story forever. All the characters were full and flawed, there were no cliché ghost story tropes, and I couldn't predict how it was going to end. A story of many ghosts, both the paranormal, and the kind we carry within ourselves. I can't wait to see what this author writes next.