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The Apparition Phase

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The Apparition Phase

By: Will Maclean
Narrated by: Theo Solomon
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

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 they 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.

©2020 Will Maclean (P)2020 Penguin Audio Ghosts Horror Haunted Scary Paranormal Fantasy

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Critic reviews

"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)
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I loved this book and thought I would listen to it on Audible as a re-read for Halloween. Loved the story but the narrator was poor. Apart from being completely unable to do any convincing female voices, his accent kept slipping. Tim would start out as a middle-class adolescent at the beginning of a sentence and then slip into a more gruff, London vernacular, by the end. Not impressed.

The Apparition Phases

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I really enjoyed the story, it was well written, creepy and entertaining. I found the narration really annoying. He made some bizarre choices for different character voices - like he was so desperate to differentiate he went really over the top. One 17 year old boy sounded like Zippy from rainbow, and a girl like a Victorian street wench. Very distracting - I’d recommend reading rather than listening

Nostalgic spooky tale

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I really enjoyed the story and the general narration was ok but I struggled with the character voices. They were all nasally and the accents were over done making some of the characters, particularly Seb, Neil and Polly difficult to listen to.

Good story but narration disappointing.

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Loved this novel, evocative and gripping, a fantastic journey. Found the narrator’s female voices a bit annoying but it didn’t spoil my over all enjoyment of a well told tale of adolescence, loss, grief and the unexplained.

Fantastic!

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Fantastic story, highly recommend! Don’t let the slow narration put you off, I listened at 1.3 speed and it sounded perfect!

Great story!

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There were elements of the story that were genuinely creepy. But ultimately, it was a mixture of real originality and leaden cliche.

It felt like there were several novels fighting to be written. However, saying all that, there were some really enjoyable scenes, and I found the description of the early '70s convincing.

I don't know who the narrator is, but I have to say that I concur with the statements given by many of the other reviewers.

A parson's egg. Good in bits.

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I read this book and loved it, so I thought I’d enjoy the audiobook just as much. But the voices. The nasal tones, the almost comically awful, inconsistent accents. I really tried. I made it to the end, because when the narrator was just talking as the main character, or SOME of the other characters it was fine. I put it on 1.2x speed (which I never do), which made the slow delivery sound much better. It’s such a shame. I feel the narrator was given a range of characters & accents that just didn’t suit him. But I love the book, so if reading physical books is your thing, give that a go.

Great story if you can get past the voices

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There were points in this book where I actually got caught up in what was happening, but the narrator was so awful that I had to stop listening regularly just to get away from his voice. Who chose such a dead, flat, emotionless, slow, boring narrator? He went on and on, and on, and on... In the end, though I did manage to listen to the whole audiobook, my brain chose to selectively forget most of it the moment it was finished. The book - trying very hard to ignore the narrator for a minute - was nothing spectacular. I didn't find it creepy or unsettling. An average book... done to death by an awful narrator.

The narrator ruined it

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I had high hopes for this book, as I had heard good things, but was unfortunately disappointed. The most intriguing element of the story is abandoned early on, to make way for an increasingly ludicrous haunted house tale. The writing is pretentious and lazy. The narration is rather distracting, with some strange accent choices made to differentiate between characters - a teenage girl is left sounding like an east end gangster; and the voices chosen for posh characters are cliched. There are also a few mistakes in the narration, with mispronouncuations which are jarring.

Disappointingly lazy and predictable

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A gripping story that evokes much of the atmosphere of the 1970s horror TV touchstones it references. The premise is a good one and kept me thoroughly entertained. Ending a ghost story is always hard to do well. The author walks a fine line between too much and too little explanation/closure. I wasn't disappointed but the ending was possibly the weakest element of a well paced and thrilling story.

The narrator was capable but some of the female voices strayed into parody, and character voices generally were sometimes too similar too each other.

gripping and atmospheric

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