In ‘Slade House,’ Mitchell Peddles Bewitching Tales

Many ghost stories begin with dark and stormy nights. However, masterful storyteller David Mitchell’s new novel “Slade House” begins with a sunny autumn day. In a seemingly normal London, an awkward but intelligent boy named Nathan walks with his mother on the way to a party; all seems well as Nathan bemoans the pretentiousness of his bow tie and wonders about a dead cat on the side of the road. Suddenly, Nathan notices the entrance to a building called Slade House. He opens the door—a tiny black iron door in the middle of an alleyway—and vanishes from the outside world. The explanation for his disappearance turns out to involve telepathy, a version of tag, oil portraits with eyes missing, Middle Eastern cults, and bone clocks—a poetic name for the human body, in addition to a literal object and a reference to David Mitchell’s most recent previous work. The complexity accumulated from these details occasionally seems excessive and even slightly thin thematic substance. Still, the novel’s suspenseful structure, skillfully drawn characters, and sumptuous strangeness all combine to produce a gripping and enjoyable piece of writing.

The novel’s plot is characteristic of Mitchell: It moves through a sprawling web of interwoven timelines, original world-building, and attractively complex characters. Slade House turns out to belong to a pair of twins who use their mystical powers to consume souls once every nine years, which they accomplish by projecting an image of Slade House into the mind of a human victim; each of the five chapters takes place in the mind of a different victim, and thus chapters are spaced nine years apart. Each progressive chapter produces a more elaborate description of the twins’ methods and rules. This five-part structure cleverly shapes the work like a classic ghost story, using repetition and variation to create great suspense. The individual sections each tell the same basic story in different contexts, revealing a consistent pattern in sharp jolts of surprise and recognition. Mitchell paces and conducts his reveals with skill, and—against the odds of the ghost story genre— manages to keep the results very unpredictable.

The book’s structure also allows Mitchell to show off his versatility as a writer. Each section features a radically different set of characters and kind of story—the first section recalls the fantastical, dreamy terror of young adult novels, while the second section feels like a contemporary horror film, a sexually-charged tale of a haunted house. The different styles work due to the strength of their respective narrators. Each character possesses a distinct mind, a distinct approach to the world, and even a distinctive language, all of which Mitchell gracefully exposes in their first appearances. The first paragraph of the section Nathan narrates finds his attention wandering away from his mother and towards small details of his environment. “The damp sky’s the color of old hankies. Seven magpies fly by. Seven’s good. Mum’s face is inches away from mine, though I’m not sure if that’s an angry face or a worried one,” he thinks. In only a few sentences, Nathan’s ability to see the ordinary in a lyrical, unusual light, his erratic patterns of attention, and his social awkwardness come fluidly through. By contrast, the next section introduces a divorced, rough-minded policeman. Mitchell writes, “A memory came back to me, of me and Julie popping in for a drink here one time. We were house hunting…it’d sounded all right in the estate agent’s but a right bloody shit hole it turned out to be.” Gordon’s failed marriage, dependence on alcohol, and brutal tendencies emerge in a voice utterly consistent with and also utterly different from Nathan’s. Mitchell’s best creation, though, might be Sally Timms, a compulsively likable, insecure college student with a crush. Her narrative is told in the third person for the first few paragraphs; she herself does not enter her own consciousness until later in her chapter. This manipulation of narrative focus demonstrates her extreme shyness with unusual inventiveness and precision.

The main strength of the stories lies in their mythology of “cracks” and “scraps”—the rules and construction of their imaginary fantasy world—as well as their structure and characters. Mitchell plays with the fabric of reality itself, creating new fictional spaces outside time and space: “You may find a weapon in the cracks,” says the voice of a particular ghost. “The cracks they throw the scraps down.” The idea of space-time “cracks” and consciousness “scraps” becomes gloriously unsettling and intriguing, and eventually, the mythology gains an almost scientific power in the meticulousness of the novel’s descriptions. Then again, the rules often verge on being too elaborate, a little too meticulously described. Excessive explanation can turn something ethereal into something banal, and—maybe counterintuitively—create more opportunities for weak spots in the reasoning to emerge. In one instance, the twins’ backstory fails to totally explain their mystical powers and invokes a little too much genre cliché.

The novel also falters slightly in its handling of deep thematic material: It addresses some complex theoretical concerns without ever fully delving into them. The nature of loss comes up, as do the ethics of survival—at one point, the twins vaguely question their practice of surviving at the expense of others—but Mitchell fails to expand and resolve either idea to a satisfying or original way. Then again, not all books need be analytical masterpieces, and it seems unfair to fault this novel for being what it is: a superbly entertaining and truly well-told story.

—Staff writer Charlotte L. R. Anrig can be reached at charlotte.anrig@thecrimson.com.