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Slade House
On sale
27th October 2015
Price: £12.99
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…
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…
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Reviews
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 other-worldiness - wonderfully human haunted house story. I plan to return to its clutches quite often
Manically ingenious . . . Vending-machine horror tropes, believable characters, wild farce, existential jeopardy, meta-fictional jokes: into the cauldron they go. Mitchell is at home in this kitchen
Chilling and dazzling . . . but the real skill of the book is in its emotional impact. Mitchell makes you care about each of the narrators
Packed with heady ideas and pulsing with dark energy . . . both dazzlingly inventive and compulsively readable
An elegant fright-fest of the highest order . . . Mitchell masterfully, humorously, combines the classic components of a scary story - old house, dark alley, missing persons - with a realism, when describing the lives of the victims, that is pacy, funny and true
Ingenious . . . a deliciously creepy story to be read for plot and for pleasure, with your heart racing, and your eyes involuntarily skipping forwards to find out what happens
A clever and deep-frozenly chilling Gothic horror story . . . genuinely good, genuinely scary
Mitchell seamlessly brings together his clashing parallel realities through wordplay so dazzling it seems to defy its own gravitational rules
Irresistible
Mitchell's most pleasurable book to date, which also features some of his finest writing . . . a quiet, delightful triumph
One of the most enjoyably, deliriously frightening novels I've read in ages . . . gleeful, skin-crawling brilliance
His work manages to beguile, impress and delight in equal parts . . . highly effective, creepy and witty
It's a gripping premise which becomes increasingly suspenseful as the stories move closer to the present day . . . Be warned, this is not a book to read before bedtime
A marvellously horrific, sharp and concise masterpiece . . . The novel's brevity should not lead the reader to underestimate just how much punch Mitchell's prose packs. His fiction is intoxicating
Crackling with menace, yet a delightful sly wit
A deliciously creepy, page-turning mystery . . . Mitchell's gift for characterisation shines through, making everyone vivid
Mitchell flits among the realest of voices - a shy teenage girl, a washed-up cop - in the most supernatural of settings: a brilliant, career-long high-wire act. If you haven't read him yet, Slade House is your 238-page, pocket-size gateway drug
Brilliantly done, spooky, tense and beautifully written, full of the writerly flourishes that Mitchell is rightly famous for
A fiendish delight . . . Mitchell is something of a magician
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
The joy in Slade House is in the discovery. It's in seeing different people make the same mistakes over and over again . . . It's in thinking that you'd be smarter, of course. That you'd see through all this B-movie schlock (like creepy portraits, sad ghosts and stairways that go nowhere), find the secret door, and escape. Only to find that you're already trapped
I gulped down this novel in a single evening. Intricately connected to David Mitchell's previous books, this compact fantasy burns with classic Mitchellian energy. Painstakingly imagined and crackling with narrative velocity, it's a Dracula for the new millennium, a Hansel and Gretel for grownups, a reminder of how much fun fiction can be