Slade House
A Novel
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4.2 • 223 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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
“A fiendish delight . . . Mitchell is something of a magician.”—The Washington Post
“Entertainingly eerie . . . We turn to [Mitchell] for brain-tickling puzzle palaces, for character studies and for language.”—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
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Conceived as a short story and doled out on Twitter over the course of a week, Slade House wears its unorthodox beginnings on its sleeve. Raw, snappy, and fast, David Mitchell’s spinoff Bone Clocks spinoff follows five characters—ranging from an awkward teen to a bigoted detective—as they’re invited into an unthinkably gorgeous manor that’s not what it seems. Mitchell’s fans will recognize the unique blend of mind-melting, character-hopping drama, but this haunted-house thrill ride will also appeal to paranormal enthusiasts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mitchell's latest novel is his shortest and lightest to date, and it functions as a sort of entry-level offering from the author of hugely ambitious novels such as Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks. Unfortunately, it gives Mitchell's fans far too little of a good thing. Tucked into an alley behind a British dive bar is the sprawling and mysterious Slade House, inhabited by the soul-eating, shape-shifting Grayer Twins. In episodes that begin in 1979 and end in the present, they lure a succession of human hosts into their Wonderland-like abode. First there's a geeky teen and his mother, then a hard-boiled detective and a crew of New Wave ghost hunters, followed by a backstory-heavy section framed as an interview with an expert on the case. All will eventually enter the mind-bending architecture of Slade House and engage in psychic warfare with its denizens. There is a solid haunted-house book in here somewhere, but it's wedged intermittently into a surfeit of quirk, repetition, and esoteric dialogue that's very hard to take seriously without a more solid foundation. It all builds up to the requisite wizard duel between the Twins and the formidable Iris Marinus-Levy, who will be familiar to readers of The Bone Clocks. The high degree of self-reference and the skipping through genre and time is trademark Mitchell, but the constant rehashing of what is already a pretty thin plot means that this offering fails to really stand up on its own, or to add anything new to the Mitchell-verse.
Customer Reviews
An Injustice
Suggesting this work is appropriate as it relates to certain calendar coincidences is facile, shallow and inappropriate. While this is not as expansive as his previous works it is a wonderful read, slightly disconcerting and another affirmation of the talent this writer possesses.
Much Better than The Boneclocjs
I hadn't planned on reading this since The Boneclocks was such an awful book and this novel is set in the same world. But this novel's smaller scope succeeds where the grandiose nonsense of The Boneclocks failed. This novel reads more like a detective fiction than like some epic battle between good and evil. That tight structure and small world turn out to be much more powerful than the sprawling mess of The Boneclocks.
Hard to put down
Unlike his other books, this one is short, but its packed with punch. Be advised to read The Bone Clocks first, as some of the characters and settings bleed over into this novel. A great read, both books.