Name: Colleen's review of Slade House by David Mitchell
Item: Slade House
Rating: 3
Author: Colleen

David Mitchell

"Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you'll find the entrance to Slade House: a surreal place where visitors see what they want to see, including some things that should be impossible. Every nine years, the house's residents--an odd brother and sister--extend a unique invitation to someone who's different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it's already too late" --

Slade House

Jenny Hindle

The New York Times bestseller by the author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Named One of the Best Books of the Year by San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, National Post, BookPage, and Kirkus Reviews Keep your eyes peeled for a small black iron door. Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you'll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Later, you'll find that you can't. Every nine years, the house's residents--an odd brother and sister--extend a unique invitation to someone who's different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a recently divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it's already too late. . . . Spanning five decades, from the last days of the 1970s to the present, leaping genres, and barreling toward an astonishing conclusion, this intricately woven novel will pull you into a reality-warping new vision of the haunted house story--as only David Mitchell could imagine it. Praise for Slade House "Devilishly fun."--The Washington Post "Entertainingly eerie . . . Slade House boils down to Mitchell's take on the classic ghost story, complete with his version of a haunted house. . . . The last thing we expected from Mitchell is simplicity, but here it is, burnished to a hellish bronze."--Chicago Tribune "A ripping yarn . . . Like Shirley Jackson's Hill House or the Overlook Hotel from Stephen King's The Shining, [Slade House] is a thin sliver of hell designed to entrap the unwary. . . . As the Mitchellverse grows ever more expansive and connected, this short but powerful novel hints at still more marvels to come."--San Francisco Chronicle "Like Stephen King in a fever . . . manically ingenious."--The Guardian (U.K.) "A haunted house story that savors of Dickens, Stephen King, J. K. Rowling and H. P. Lovecraft, but possesses more psychic voltage than any of them."--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "Tightly crafted and suspenseful yet warmly human . . . the ultimate spooky nursery tale for adults."--The Huffington Post "Diabolically entertaining . . . dark, thrilling, and fun . . . a thoroughly entertaining ride full of mind games, unexpected twists, and even a few laughs."--The Daily Beast "Plants died, milk curdled, and my children went slightly feral as I succumbed to the creepy magic of David Mitchell's Slade House. It's a wildly inventive, chilling, and--for all its otherworldliness--wonderfully human haunted house story. I plan to return to its clutches quite often."--Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl and The Grownup "I gulped down this novel in a single evening. Painstakingly imagined and crackling with narrative velocity, it's a Dracula for the new millennium, a reminder of how much fun fiction can be."--Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize "David Mitchell doesn't break rules so much as he proves them to be inhibitors to lively intelligent fiction."--#1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz From the Hardcover edition.

Colleen

3 Stars
 
I didn’t read much about Slade House prior to starting the book. It seemed like the sort of story that it’s better to go into blind. Once I started reading it, I found out that David Mitchell is apparently known for tying his stories together even when they aren’t part of the same series or even in the same genre. I wasn’t aware of that since this is the first book of his that I’d read. But the consensus on Goodreads seemed to be that reading his other works prior to Slade House would enlighten Easter Eggs but was not crucial. And at first that seemed true… more on that later.
 
Slade House is a creepy psychological thriller set in a mysterious house in London whose door only appears every nine years. I can’t discuss the plot without giving stuff away though. The story has an episodic feel, following what happens during each nine-year interval. I didn’t know what was going on at first, but I loved the creepy atmosphere and not knowing what was real or not. I was intrigued by the strange and fascinating story. Because of the episodic nature of the story, there was not much character development, but I was still invested in the outcome even if I was rooting for certain characters more than others.
 
It’s a fast-paced novella. I was breezing right through expecting to give it 4 – 4.5 Stars… and then came the ending. I’m trying not to overtly spoil anything, but the ending sharply veers in the opposite direction. With the turn of a page, the story suddenly blasts in characters, events, and concepts that are apparently from The Bone Clocks. There is no real explanation of these additions. It was sloppy deus ex machina to bomb in a bunch of stuff from a different book at the last minute to hastily wrap everything up. It was terrible and really pissed me off. I actually started rooting for the bad side to win just because I was so pissed off. To people who have read the other books, particularly The Bone Clocks, it probably seemed like a delightful tie-in. But to other readers, throwing that hodgepodge of unexplained things in literally during the climax was extremely off-putting and amateurish. And the ending was left open, so this really seemed more like an in-between novella rather than a work that could stand on its own.
 
I’m really torn on how to rate Slade House. As I mentioned, most of it was at least four stars to me, but the ending was one star only. I’m also torn about whether or not to try any of Mitchell’s other books. I liked his style overall, and I’m ok with books tying together. But I am not ok with how sloppy the ending of this book was. And you should not have to read every single book an author has written in publication order if they aren’t part of the same series. That’s ridiculous. I may try Mitchell’s work again… after a long cooling down period. Right now I’m still considering lowering my rating to two stars just out of spite for that slobberdash ending.


RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 4 Stars
Writing Style: 3 Stars
Characters and Character Development: 3 Stars
Plot Structure and Development: 2 Stars
Level of Captivation: 4 Stars
Originality: 3 Stars

Siya S

I've read this just a few years ago and can't for the life of me recall anything about this book like, at all. I am granny dementia right now.

Janice Hopper

Well, that was a trip.

I have a couple of David Mitchell books on my TBR pile, but this is the first one I've actually gotten all the way through. I'd heard the guys on The Coode Street podcast mention is as basically a genre book, specifically a horror book. I definitely think it qualifies.

I'll tuck this behind a spoiler tag, just in case. The story tells of people (view spoiler)[ who are lured into a house that doesn't really exist by soul-eating twins trying to extend their lives beyond normal limits. (hide spoiler)] We find out more and more about the characters as the story goes on, right down to a slightly cliched horror movie sort of ending. 

The writing is great, the story is engrossing. It's a short book. I read it pretty quickly.

Read it, it's good.

Jayme Bosio

Our theme for our upcoming book club is, of course, haunted houses. Not my usual read…stupid people staying in a creepy old house…you get what you deserve. But this book was different - the writing was excellent and the way the stories connected kept me engaged. I highly recommend it.

Sonja H

David Mitchell, ein britischer Schriftsteller, der u.a. für seine Werke „Die tausend Herbste des Jacob de Zoet“ oder „Der Wolkenatlas“ bekannt ist, hat mit „Slade House“ ein Spin-Off einer seiner letzten Romane „Die Knochenuhren“ veröffentlicht.

Da ich die Geschichte, mit der alles begann, noch nicht gelesen habe, war ich mir nicht sicher, ob ich diese Erzählung verstehen würde, denn ich weiß, dass Mitchell seine Texte regelrecht komponiert und mit Andeutungen und Querverbindungen experimentiert. Er hat aus dem geschriebenen Wort eine eigene Kunstform entwickelt – komplex und doch zugänglich für seine Leser.

„Slade House“ wird gern dem Gruselgenre zugeordnet, da wir uns in einem sehr bizarren Haus befinden, in dem Leute zunächst in eine Handlung verwickelt werden und plötzlich vom Erdboden verschwinden.
Doch eigentlich ist es mehr als eine Schauerstory. Es verwebt das Leben von sechs Menschen, die auf den ersten Blick nur lose miteinander bekannt sind, aber auf einer höheren Ebene Ähnlichkeiten aufweisen, die der Autor hier leider nicht im Detail erklärt, die jedoch Teil einer eigenen Geschichte sind, die besonders im letzten Kapitel eine große Rolle spielt, allerdings auch für Verwirrung bei mir gesorgt hat. So viele Begriffe fallen, mit denen ich nichts anfangen kann. Sie tun diesem Buch zwar keinen Abbruch, hinterlassen aber ein großes Fragezeichen.

Ich hätte gern viel, viel mehr über die Bewohner des Hauses erfahren, über die feindliche Organisation, die ihnen auf den Fersen ist, über den Mechanismus, mit dem sie ihre Opfer einfangen, über das „Experiment“, das sie erschaffen haben.
Ich hoffe, dass ich ein paar Antworten dazu im Roman „Die Knochenuhren“ finden werde, den ich nun begonnen habe, da mich Mitchell ein weiteres Mal mit seinem Können fasziniert hat.

„Slade House“ ist – da es sich nun einmal um ein Spin-Off handelt – nicht ganz so vielschichtig wie beispielsweise „Der Wolkenatlas“, vermag aber bestens zu unterhalten und lässt viel Raum für Spekulationen.
Leseempfehlung!

Fraser Simons

I liked this more and more the further I got into it. 

As so many Mitchell books seem to do, this book chronicles the lives of some mysterious young twins. We get this story via Slade House. We get it via ghost stories experienced by other people who venture into its nooks and crannies, probing for different things each time jump. From 1979 to 2015 the supernatural reigns over this curiosity across from the Fox and the Hound pub. 

It unfolds quite satisfyingly too. Just when I was done with the patterning, it changed it up, and to great effect, I felt. It’s a short book that knows the half life of its stylistic cycle well. 

This also adds on some to the meta story in interesting ways, but that’s spoiler territory for both this book and two others. I’ve been making YouTube videos on this little journey I’m taking, reading all of the Mitchell books to get the full meta, or Uber novel, as some call it, and making note of the connections. It’s a fun time and one that’s getting more interesting as more of the meta gets built upon.

And as usual, I think Mitchell is pretty adept at slipping into various voices. From historical to contemporary, we get unique cadence and diction and personality. And when it’s over, it does still feel like a ghost story but it also certainly, more than any others, probably requires you to know the meta components to grasp everything, as a Horologist makes an appearance. But I also think it could be an interesting launching pad to jump into another book with said meta stuff, if it piques your interest. 

For me, going from Thousand Autumns to Bone Clocks to this was a very nice arc, though. It contextualizes everything, doesn’t spoil anything, and nicely sorts the arc. I read Cloud Atlas first and remember it quite well but it tied into the end of the Bone Clocks only tangentially, from what I remember. 

Regardless, it’s short, fun, spooky, and, as noted, adds to the meta novel in interesting ways. It steadily rose from a 3 to a 4 star rating.

Born out of the short story David Mitchell published on Twitter in 2014 and inhabiting the same universe as his latest bestselling novel The Bone Clocks, this is the perfect book to curl up with on a dark and stormy night. Turn down Slade Alley - narrow, dank and easy to miss, even when you're looking for it. Find the small black iron door set into the right-hand wall. No handle, no keyhole, but at your touch it swings open. Enter the sunlit garden of an old house that doesn't quite make sense; too grand for the shabby neighbourhood, too large for the space it occupies. A stranger greets you by name and invites you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Later, you'll find that you can't. This unnerving, taut and intricately woven tale by one of our most original and bewitching writers begins in 1979 and reaches its turbulent conclusion around Hallowe'en, 2015. Because every nine years, on the last Saturday of October, a 'guest' is summoned to Slade House. But why has that person been chosen, by whom and for what purpose? The answers lie waiting in the long attic, at the top of the stairs...

Emmett

Magic flourishes in mystery, and the shade - where it becomes too clear, it becomes a little outrageous, and this book teeters between gravity/horror, and levity.

The first few sections are the most magical, as the reader's blurry view of Slade House and its workings comes into tantalising view and the readers are, time and again, helpless spectators of a tragedy that repeats without being desensitising. Slade House itself is a marvellous construction of the imagination (and its mechanisms made me wonder whether it could be a thinly-veiled allegory for the imagination, and the same thought goes for the magic here). I love its placement within the suburban, which is the last place to expect anything magical happening, the pleasant artificiality of concrete houses obscuring an incomprehensible horror, the inconspicuous anonymity of a neatly-closed iron door. The 'protagonists', short as their appearances are, are sufficiently engaging, carrying each section forward in their own way, unique enough to be more than merely plot-driving vehicles. Nathan and Sally are very likeable. The subleties of words and thought patterns varying across individuals of different ages and personalities is a testament to Mitchell's skill. 

The clarity that the last sections were committed to delivering, alas, almost disfigures the novel's beauty. The account of Jonah and Norah's lives was revealed too easily and in too whole a piece, in a novel that has, prior to this patch of story-telling, traded in shadows and horrors half-formed. Where things should fall together, they nearly fall apart. The very last chapter, with its plenitude of exotic magical jargon and figures seemingly conjured out of nowhere, is an inadequate deus ex machina that does not live up to the atmosphere this novel has tried, and succeeded, in building. The climactic moment is a far cry from the quiet wonder of Nathan entering the garden's deceptive solace, which begins the novel. The final few pages return to a lyrical register that mirrors the beginning, but unfortunately that, beautiful as it is, makes one long for the lost chance of what it could be - the silk-soft magic touch of language, sustained till the end.

Cindy Lieberman

Closer to 4.5 stars, I think!

This book was honestly fascinating! I love how it unfolds with each chapter, and it kept me guessing as well as kept me on my toes!!

I didn't find it really scary, but it was a very interesting read!

Michael Chen

Anastaciya

Oooh, I liked it. Very October-appropriate read. Fast paced, weird, but not too much so that you are left questioning wtf at the end.

StaticWaffle

This book follows five different narrators and their encounters with Slade House. They all seem like they could be their own story, with the exception of the last two which tie it all together. However, the book flowed very nicely and nothing felt too slow. I really enjoyed Mitchell’s writing style. It’s dark, quick, witty and filled with detail and description—and he handles pacing very well.

I only realized after finishing the book that it references another novel of his, Bone Clocks, however I think that this book works really well as a stand alone story.

This book is categorized as horror, but I never felt like it was too scary. If you like suspense and magic and like books where you’re not entirely sure what’s going on at first—this book is for you!

Daryl Houston

Neither especially good nor especially bad, this book picks up some of the stuff introduced in the abomination The Bone Clocks. I enjoyed it well enough but probably would have gotten tired of it if it had been much longer. I really wish Mitchell would get away from this this weird part of his work. I'm sort of hoping that in the way that the ham-handed pot boiler sections of Cloud Atlas were sort of intentionally bad for the sake of touching on that genre (this is my reading, at least) while the book as a whole was dazzling, this whole horological theme in Mitchell's body of work will prove to be small and well placed within the grander scheme of his lifetime body of work.

"Manically ingenious ... EAch fresh product of Mitchell's soaring imagination functions as an echo chamber for both his previous ideas and his oeuvre to come." (Liz Jensen, Guardian)

Beth Bartholomew

Going into this book, I did not realise it was a companion novel to The Bone Clocks, a book I have not read, but do now own. I don't know how much more I would have gained from this book had I of read The Bone Clocks prior to reading Slade House, but I was certainly still able to follow the story. This book actually started as a Twitter thread, it was written to be enjoyed and that is what I did.

This book is about Slade House, a place that you will only know about if it wants you to. Once you're inside, you'll never want to leave, but then you realise you never can. It follows the characters lured in by this paranormal house.

If you think about how weird a nightmare can be and how unreal everything seems, yet it still makes sense to sleepy you - that's what this book is like. David Mitchell has written this dreamlike world in such a clever way that I really felt like I was in a nightmare of my own, watching these characters. I think it's exceptionally hard to capture the fear and weirdness of this type of state, but this book does it perfectly.

One of the characters describes a scene in a way that summarises the feel of this book perfectly:

“Tonight feels like a board game co-designed by MC Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever,”

I don't think any book has ever been less predictable, I had no idea what was going to happen and this book kept lulling me into a false sense of security. Every character was different and it followed several different people throughout the plot, which made me feel like my alliances were always changing with who I liked the best. I thought I knew where things were going in this book, but then BAM it turned it all around and I was back at square one again.

This book makes you think, but then it makes you disregard your thoughts because yeah, you were wrong. It is both totally bizarre and wonderful, I really enjoyed it and would recommend it for a quick, but fun read. I feel like I now need to talk to someone about this book, my reading experience involved a lot of shouting out loud at the pages.

Bryan Alexander

Slade House is a treat, an energetic, inventive, and very entertaining weird fiction. 

The short novel concerns a mysterious house and its... interactions with people over time. I can't say anything more without spoilage, since the book is so strongly plot-driven, with major twists happening very frequently. I can say that the prose and dialog sparkle; that Mitchell continues his brand of well-crafted multi-voice, multi-narrative storytelling; that I had a hard time putting the book away, and shared passages online and out loud. You can see from the table of contents that the novel consists of historically located chapters (1979, 1988, 1997, etc), which gives you some idea of where the book goes.

I gather that Slade House is a sequel to another Mitchell novel, Bone Clocks, which I haven't read, but that didn't matter. This novel stands on its own. It is rich enough in detail and world-building that I can imagine links to other texts (who were the Bishops?), and yet that only whetted my appetite for more.

The novel's structure only proceeds in one temporal direction, unlike Cloud Atlas, but Mitchell does a terrific job of seeing details for each chapter in the preceding ones, so I found myself reading back to look for the first hints of subsequently important characters and objects. He does this so well.

Stylistically Slade is a pleasure. Mitchell delights in language throughout, from rich paragraphs to cackling dialog.
"I almost understand why you tolerate this plodding clerk, this risible thesp, this dim corgi who fancies himself a wolf. But come: between you and me, is he not a liability?" (223)
Or "Let's reminisce later, Sister. Dinner is served. It's warm, confused, afraid, it's imbibed Banjax, and it's ready for filleting." (34)

Generically, I'd call this urban fantasy, since it has fantastic elements and is all about situating the ontologically strange within a major city. It's also weird, maybe even new weird, with its surreal touches and sense of dread. That dread helps locate this additionally in the horror field, as do a series of bad demises. There's also a bit of alternate history.

Now let me rip the spoiler wall down: (view spoiler)[Slade House is a trap, a kind of Venus fly trap by which two evil magicians torment and kill the unlucky. Each chapter follows one person as they head down a mysterious London alley and fall in with the twins' creative fake worlds. It's very moving to get into the mind of each character, only to see them tricked and consumed, struggling with the realization of their dire fates. I also enjoyed seeing Mitchell gradually reveal the fantasy and historical structure for all of this.

The final chapter sees Jonah and Norah undone by enemy magicians, which was, of course, satisfying. And naturally, like a slasher movie, one gets away in the final soaring paragraph.

It's such a sad book! Mitchell really goes for the jugular right away, giving us a child who gets mistreated, then tortured, then slowly killed. Several other characters are brutally exploited, most notably poor Sally Timms.

So why not 5 stars? Partly because the villains are too thinly drawn. They are delightful, but not too credible as human beings. Even by the end they seem almost perfunctory. It's hard to buy Jonah's stupid and final error, and his sister's love is just tacked on. Jonah's monologuing is way, way too generous, a too easy trick to slide exposition our way.
 (hide spoiler)]
I'd like to add more, but want to go read the few Mitchell chapters I haven't yet read. I hope I've teased you enough to plunge into Slade House. Find the right alley, then keep an eye out for the unusually small door. Go on and push it open. Treats await.

Jenny Hindle &
Slade House by David Mitchell

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Jenny Hindle &
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