Even for an author like David Mitchell, well known for embracing the strange and distinct in novels like The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas, Slade House is an odd piece of writing. Unlike Mitchell's recent 600-plus-page behemoths, Slade House could easily qualify as a novella, with its 256 pages padded by an unusually small trim size and generous chapter breaks. The book's brevity may be explained by its origin--the first chapter is an adaptation of a short story called "The Right Sort" that Mitchell released in truncated pieces over Twitter. Regardless of length, Slade House is a complex, twisty little gem that fans of the author will absolutely devour.
Slade House is, at its core, a haunted house story. That fact, along with the novel's brevity, invites comparisons with Henry James's classic novella The Turn of the Screw, but the novel's 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. Readers left cold by the convoluted plot--with heavy ties to The Bone Clocks and at least a few references to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet--will still find themselves thoroughly enchanted by Mitchell's virtuosic prose. In this excerpt from the first chapter, Mitchell even manages a cheeky meta-textual wink at the structure of the novel about to unfold:
On the way here we saw zebras and giraffes. No spooky portraits, no Slade House, no mastiff. Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic "F" if anyone ever writes "I woke up and it was all a dream" at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer; that it's a cop-out, it's the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream.
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
Shelf Talker: Slade House is David Mitchell's snack-sized take on the haunted house genre, with the labyrinthine plot, fully realized characters and brilliant prose that have come to mark his body of work.