Slade House

One might assume that Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn wouldn’t spook easily, or that, lauded as she is for creating a skin-crawlingly creepy tale, she might somehow be hardened to effects of the thriller genre. Yet of David Mitchell’s Slade House she admits: ‘Plants died, milk curdled, and my children went slightly feral as I succumbed to [its] creepy magic. It’s a wildly inventive, chilling, and – for all its otherworldliness – wonderfully human haunted house story.’ Spawned from a short story that Mitchell first published on Twitter, Slade House is his shortest book at just 200 pages and like Cloud Atlas, is a collection of novellas housed together within a single cover. Each is set nine years after the one before it when, on the last Saturday of October, the impossible-to-discover Slade House welcomes a new visitor – a visitor who will never leave, as his or her soul is feasted upon by the twin Anchorite cult-members Jonah and Norah, in order to sustain their youth. True to form, Mitchell includes plenty of reference to his previous novels (although it isn’t necessary to have read them in order to enjoyably consume this one). But there is something new here that hasn’t before been as fully explored by the award-winning author (and that might surprise given the book’s frightening premise): total hilarity of the all-out, farce-laden, parody-filled variety.