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Book Reviewed by: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.
Readers who love Mitchell's genre-bending writing style won't be disappointed — he remains a master at his craft. But these same readers might find that narrators in Slade House sound similar to those in other novels. And though this book expands on Mitchell's alternative reality universe, characters clumsily, and sometimes too obviously, explain how the plot's fantastical elements work. Despite a few issues, Slade House captures your attention from the start...continued
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(Reviewed by Kendra Wright-Winchester).
You might not find Slade House in the real world, but England, where the novel is set, boasts of haunted houses with their own sinister histories. Here are two of them.
The Borley Rectory
The rectory in the village of Borley in Essex was built in the 1860s for the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull. After his death in 1892 his son, Harry Bull, took over the parish. On his death in 1928, the Rev. and Mrs. Smith moved into the vicarage and started to report odd phenomena. They contacted a tabloid newspaper who sent in paranormal researcher Harry Price, and immediately the level of paranormal activity increased. Mrs. Smith would later say that she thought that Price had instigated much of it. Local lore at the time (believed to have ...
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If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves
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Adam Johnson, author of Fortune Smiles and The Orphan Master's Son, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
What can't David Mitchell do? Slade House is a page-burning, read-in-one-sitting, at times terrifying novel that does for the haunted-house story what Henry James did for the ghost story in The Turn of the Screw. It has all the intelligence and linguistic dazzle one expects from a David Mitchell novel, but it will also creep the pants off you.
