Deliverance

The Reverend Dr Jason Bray appears silhouetted on the cover of Deliverance in a long black coat, sporting a fedora and carrying a small bag. He’s looking away from us towards an old-fashioned lamppost, in an image that’s a playful nod to the poster for the chilling 1973 horror film The Exorcist. Because the Reverend is a ‘deliverance minister’, an active though little-publicised function carried out by the Anglican Church i n which priests are trained and given special permission to deal with the paranormal.

This isn’t a full-time role, but an additional duty he carries out on top of his job as the vicar of a parish in Wrexham. These extracurricular activities are of an ad-hoc nature – about a dozen cases a year – requiring him to respond to troubled souls who sheepishly sidle up to him after evensong, or are referred via the local diocese office.

What they all share is a need for spiritual help with assorted strange happenings, though more often than not these issues turn out to have an earthly root cause that can be resolved through some gentle talking therapy with the vicar; he’s certainly a good listener – and also a sympathetic teller of these uncanny encounters. Deliverance is an intriguing, strangely comforting book that shines a light into a world that’s little talked about: the commonest call-outs, we learn, are to ‘poltergeist activity’ (thought by the vicar to be the externalised manifestations of a person’s fears and troubles) and ‘ place hauntings’, a kind of recording or imprint left in a house by a deceased former resident. Demonic possessions, like those of the child Regan (Linda Blair, above) in The Exorcist, are ‘exceedingly rare’, the Reverend informs us: thankfully he’s never yet encountered such a case.