Slade House, the new novel from David Mitchell, is out – just a year after the release of the Man Booker Prize-longlisted The Bone Clocks.
The new novel inhabits the same universe as The Bone Clocks, which Mitchell calls “by far the darkest book I’ve done” and “an exercise in world building and cosmology.”
Slade House originated as a Twitter novel, The Right Sort, which Mitchell tweeted last year, just ahead of the publication of The Bone Clocks. But, as he tells The Miami Herald, “I found that it was asking more questions than it was raising. In the end, I couldn’t resist translating it back to more conventional prose, oxygenating it more than Twitter was allowing me to.”
The book’s five interlocking narratives begin in 1979 and ends in 2015; five “guests” separated enter Slade House for a brief visit, only to vanish without trace from the outside world. At just over 200 pages, Slade House is Mitchell’s slimmest novel yet. His work could be described as literary fiction shaped by science fiction and fantasy, but his latest is a ghost story. As Mitchell recently told Salon, “The idea of confining an entire genre as being unworthy of your attention is a bizarre act of self-harm.”
Mitchell is the author of the novels Ghostwritten, number9dream, Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Bone Clocks.
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, bestselling author of Gone Girl and The Grownup
About Slade House
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.
Read an excerpt:
“Tell me about your recurring nightmare, Nathan.” We’re sitting by the pond on warm paving slabs. The pond’s a long rectangle, with water lilies and a bronze statue of Neptune in the middle gone turquoise and bruised. The pond’s bigger than our whole garden, which is really just a muddy yard with a washing line and rubbish bins. Dad’s lodge in Rhodesia has land going down to a river where there’re hippos. I think of Mrs. Marconi telling me to “Focus on the subject.” “How do you know about my nightmare?”
“You have that hunted look,” says Jonah.
I lob a pebble up, high over the water. Its arc is maths.
“Is your nightmare anything to do with your scars?”
Immediately my hand’s pulled my hair down over the white-and-pink-streaked area below my right ear, to hide where the damage shows the most. The stone goes plop! but the splash is invisible. I won’t think about the mastiff launching itself at me, its fangs pulling skin off my cheek like roast chicken, its eyes as it shook me like a doll, its teeth locked around my jawbone; or the weeks in hospital, the injections, the drugs, the surgery, the faces people make; or how the mastiff’s still waiting for me when I fall asleep.
A dragonfly settles on a bulrush an inch from my nose. Its wings are like cellophane and Jonah says, “Its wings are like cellophane,” and I say, “I was just thinking that,” but Jonah says, “Just thinking what?” so maybe I just thought he’d said it. Valium rubs out speech marks and pops thought- bubbles. I’ve noticed it before.
In the house, Mum’s playing warm- up arpeggios. The dragonfly’s gone. “Do you have nightmares?” I ask. “I have nightmares,” says Jonah, “about running out of food.”
“Go to bed with a packet of digestives,” I tell him.
Jonah’s teeth are perfect, like the smiley kid with zero fill-ings off the Colgate advert. “Not that kind of food, Nathan.”
“What other kinds of food are there?” I ask.
A skylark’s Morse-coding from a far far far far star.
“Food that makes you hungrier, the more of it you eat,” says Jonah. Shrubs tremble blurrily like they’re being sketched in.
“No wonder you don’t go to a normal school,” I say. Jonah winds a stem of grass round his thumb . . . . . . and snaps it.
The pond’s gone and we’re under a tree, so obviously it’s another stem of grass, a later snap. The Valium’s throbbing in my fingertips now, and the sunlight’s a harpist. Fallen leaves on the shaved lawn are shaped like tiny fans. “This tree’s a ginkgo tree,” says Jonah. “Whoever lived at Slade House half a century ago planted it.” I start arranging ginkgo leaves into a large Africa, about one foot from Cairo to Johannesburg. Jonah’s lying on his back now, either asleep or just with his eyes closed. He hasn’t asked me about football once, or said I’m gay for liking classical music. Maybe this is like hav-ing a friend. Time must’ve passed, because my Africa’s fin-ished. I don’t know the time exactly because last Sunday I took my watch apart to improve it, and when I put it back together again some pieces were missing. Not quite like Humpty Dumpty. Mum cried when she saw the watch’s insides and shut herself in her room so I had to eat cornflakes for tea again. I don’t know why she got upset. The watch was old, dead old, made long before I was even born. The leaves I remove for Lake Victoria, I use for Madagascar. “Wow,” says Jonah, leaning his head on an elbow. Do you say “Thanks” when someone says
“Wow”? I don’t know, so I play safe and ask,
“Do you ever think you might be a different species of human, knitted out of raw DNA in a laboratory like in The Island of Doctor Moreau, and then turned loose to see if you can pass yourself off as normal or not?” Gentle applause flutters down from an upstairs room.
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- Slade House by David Mitchell
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EAN: 9780812998689
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Author image: University of Michigan