Haunting book born of tweets
Slade House, the chilling new novel from British writer David Mitchell, began as a lark. To promote his 2014 novel The Bone Clocks, Mitchell took to Twitter, composing a short story over the course of hundreds of tweets, the narrative shaped by the restrictions of the form.
The experience seems to have galvanized Mitchell into further writing; just a year after The Bone Clocks, we have Slade House, with a rewritten version of that Twitter story serving as its opening chapter.
Given the short journey from inspiration to publication, one might assume that Slade House is a slight work, and this is true to an extent: it’s substantially shorter than most of Mitchell’s previous novels, and lacking in their stylistic and thematic sprawl. But that’s not a criticism; in fact, the slightness of Slade House may be its greatest strength.
The titular Slade House is a manse behind a high wall in a fairly generic English neighbourhood, its gardens entered through a doorway in a dank alley. The house, however, only exists for a single day every nine years. And every nine years, there is a mysterious disappearance, individuals who come seeking the house, never to be seen again. Each chapter chronicles one of these days, one of these disappearances, beginning with Nathan in 1979, accompanying his mother who has been invited to “a musical gathering. A soirée.”
We’re in classic haunted house territory here, or so we think. In true David Mitchell fashion, nothing is that simple. With immortals, soul vampires, frozen time and shifting realities, Mitchell has created a phantasmagorical synthesis of horror tropes. By wholeheartedly embracing clichés, Mitchell is able to subvert them, to create something fresh, something unexpected.
The slightness of Slade House focuses that horror, compressing the action to maximize tension, shifting direction slightly with each chapter to keep any sense of pattern at bay. A longer book would have allowed that energy to dissipate, to a much lower overall effect. The economy of the story allows for greater accessibility.