The Apparition Phase
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Narrated by:
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Theo Solomon
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By:
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Will Maclean
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 AudioCritic 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)
What listeners say about The Apparition Phase
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- B. Rawlings
- 04-02-2022
Really torn on this one It was a bit if a roller.
First off, I want to warn potential readers that this story is quite depressing. Not that it's overly dark or graphic, but the depiction of Tim's life and, in particular, the ending, are quite sad and leave you feeling empty. In saying that, they are also quite realistic.
This story is broken into several sections. The first, Tim and Abby's childhood. This section has its moments and is generally entertaining. Then it skips forward in time to Tim's general adolescence. This section, although necessary to the story, makes it feel more like a coming of age story than anything horror or thriller. But this section inevitably leads to the main part, and easily the most interesting part, where Tim (quite randomly) joins a group of strangers staying in an old, supposedly haunted, house, where they conduct numerous séances together. The characters here are much richer and more 3D than any of the others and it's easy to get hooked on this portion of the story. I certainly did! But alas, it comes to a crashing end, and a bleak one at that, and then there's one more final section for the last hour or so, the downward spiral and epilogue, much of which feels disjointed and destructive of the rest of the story. It made it hard to enjoy, that's for sure, but I'm wondering if perhaps that was the point and the intention of the author.
Anyway, the narrator does a decent job, and the story telling is reasonably well done. One of my main qualms is that chapters always ended at a good part, then the story jumped forward in time for the next chapter, so you missed out on important reactions and happenings. It started to feel cheap over time, the more it happened. There were also random blocks of time where nothing occurred between the characters, even though they were all together and doing nothing. How does it take 7 hours for a bored group of people to discuss something important? It just isn't believable.
4/5 overall for me. Listen to it just for the "haunting" aspect, but be prepared for a life story being thrown in with it.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- sandra darling
- 01-12-2020
Creepy ghost story
Absolutely loved this story! Spooky, well paced, and a story within a story- I will encourage listeners to bear with the narration, because the story is truly worth it.
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