Epeolatry Book Review: The Apparitions of Ruin by Ian R Cran
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Title: The Apparitions of Ruin
Author: Ian R Cran
Genre: ghost fiction
Publisher: Independent
Publication Date: 9th January, 2024
Synopsis: In recent years, Friar’s Dale has earned itself the reputation of ‘Britain’s Most Haunted Village’. The body of Nicholas Doyle has been found at one of the village’s renowned haunted locations: at a crossroads, where a gallows still stands. He has a bullet hole to the head, but there is no exit wound – and no bullet.
Due to the paranormal abilities they have inherited, Charlotte, Aaron and Emma Burroughs are recruited by a government agency to look into the strange death. As they investigate, Emma’s ability to trigger a visual playback of a person’s final moments before death reveals a supernatural connection to Doyle’s murder.
But everyone knows ghosts cannot kill!
When a second body is found, the pressure is on to solve the mystery behind the macabre deaths in Friar’s Dale – before they become the next victims.
I’m always one for a story, one that isn’t an exploration of the latest ills befalling society, one that takes you off on an adventure―and this is it. I’d noticed the eye-catching cover a while ago and read of the tale behind its creation – a student of Cran’s designed it – and I’d read the blurb: sufficiently spooky and rural to gain my attention. So I had planned to read it, but Fate threw it at me a little earlier when I met Ian R Cran as I was leaving the inaugural UK Indie Horror Chapter con in rainy Birmingham at the weekend. We were only able to have a brief chat but he had a copy of his book which he gave to me. It seems this book and I were always meant to be!
I started reading it on the train home, and kept reading and kept reading ― a very good sign, and finished the following day. If there is one thing this book is, it’s a page turner. From the opening chapter describing the mysterious death that triggers the investigation by a sibling trio (with recently discovered supernatural powers), it piles on ghostly happening after ghostly happening, each with its origins in a specific slice of the village’s history. Each event results in an additional murder and the siblings need to discover what – or who – is behind it all.
Cran creates a great sense of atmosphere in his description of the village and the surrounding countryside. Historic buildings, abandoned mansions, an old gibbet are sprinkled over the pages before you are taken to the ultimate place of history: Eyam, the plague village of the 17th century (a place on my bucket list to visit).
He has carved real people in the sibling trio with their very recognisable rivalries, irritations and foibles. He makes us care about them. And the ghostly events themselves and their manipulation is something original, or at least I haven’t seen this twist. The way it ended, also set up the possibility of future stories featuring the siblings and I hope Cran does create more, he is a natural storyteller.
I will warn there is a little ‘head-hopping’ between different points of view but as someone who has grown up with literature of that kind, that has never bothered me (the trend seems to be against it these days) and nor was I confused.
History and ghosts and murder and mystery are a winning combination in my book and this story won me over.
/5
Available from Amazon.
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Stephanie Ellis writes dark speculative prose and poetry and has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Her longer work includes the folk horror novels, The Five Turns of the Wheel, Reborn, and The Woodcutter, and the post-apocalyptic/horror/sci-fi The Barricade, and the novellas, Bottled and Paused. Her dark poetry has been published in her collections Lilith Rising (co-authored with Shane Douglas Keene), Foundlings (co-authored with Cindy O’Quinn) and Metallurgy, as well as the HWA Poetry Showcase Volumes VI, VII, VIII, and IX and Black Spot Books Under Her Skin. She can be found supporting indie authors at HorrorTree.com via the weekly Indie Bookshelf Releases. She can be found at https://stephanieellis.org and on Blue Sky as stephellis.bsky.social.
