David Mitchell, well known for strange and distinct novels like The Bone Clocks, offers Slade House as a story of a haunting. The book's brevity may invite comparisons with Henry James's classic novella The Turn of the Screw, but its cyclical, time-hopping, plot-dense structure is pure David Mitchell.
The story begins in 1979, as a possibly autistic boy named Nathan accompanies his mother to a strange house filled with upper-crust English partygoers. Their visit takes a turn for the worse as the house starts to reveal its surreal nature, and Nathan eventually finds himself introduced to the (literally) soul-sucking twins who serve as the antagonists in the novel. Four more chapters introduce four new main characters to the house and its constantly morphing inhabitants at an interval of nine years. Slade House finds its horror in the plot's repetition, summoning up a helpless feeling of inevitability fended off only by its slight variations in each chapter and Mitchell's devilish wit.
Each new character becomes well rounded and familiar in a short amount of time thanks to Mitchell's fantastically nimble first-person narration. Mitchell is the rare kind of genius who can insert what amounts to a thesis statement into the mouth of a character without violating that character's integrity. It's exactly the sort of neat trick that Mitchell fans have been raving about for years, and with good reason. Cliché or no, Slade House reinforces the notion that there really is no one out there like David Mitchell. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books