posted on 30 Oct 2015

Slade House by David Mitchell

When I started reading Mitchell’s latest, shortish, novel I thought I was going to get an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek chiller released in time to cash in on Halloween. In many ways, that’s exactly what it was but, taken in the totality of Mitchell’s recent work, the story is another and important jigsaw piece in his burgeoning alternative universe.

What becomes clear the further into the book you get is that there are going to be all sorts of disturbing echoes of his previous work – in particular The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet  and his most recent novel The Bone Clocks.  We find ourselves back in the invisible parallel world of the good and bad ‘atemporals’ who cross over with our known world of the material and the familiar and cause various degrees of mayhem.

The book has a disarmingly simple structure. Five stories revolve around a central conceit of a house that only appears every nine years in an otherwise unremarkable maze of streets and exists just long enough to lure in its chosen victims.

I have to tread carefully here because I want you to enjoy reading this book but I don’t want to give away the key elements that need to remain surprising. And there are plenty surprises and shocks with some quite graphic material that would fit seamlessly into any Stephen King novel.

Mitchell is a really terrific writer in my opinion. He can do humour, suspense and horror with equal alacrity and he gets them all out on display here. I was captured by each of the stories as each nine year period elapses and the experiences of a young, autistic (?) boy, a rather vile, sexist policeman, students, paranormal investigators and more are effortlessly convincing.

However, I’m still not entirely convinced by the shadow world Mitchell is busy creating. The only time the book begins to lose pace and the credibility gets stretched is when Mitchell uses his characters to back-fill the psycho-mysteries of the atemporals. I like my supernatural to be supernatural – I’m considerably more disturbed by the unexplainable and potentially random evil than by the existence of a parallel world of atemporal creatures who can cross over into our everyday life – even when they want to steal our souls.

But I have to admit, the book is a good romp of a read and if you like to see a tale unfold in a portfolio format where you get five good stories held together by a single central conceit, you’re in for a treat that can be satisfyingly consumed in a day of dedicated reading.

Terry Potter

October 2015