‘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.’
Every 9 years, a mysterious and mind-bending house – ‘too grand for the shabby neighbourhood, too large for the space it occupies’ – appears along a dark alleyway and a victim is lured inside, never to be seen again. In Slade House by David Mitchell we follow a handful of characters as they are led disorientatingly, bewilderingly, and mind-bogglingly to their deaths.
The book is entertaining, bouncing along from one character’s messy demise to another. The individual stories are claustrophobic and macabre; drawing you in, chewing you up and spitting you out of the other side (much like the house). I enjoyed the little details that intertwined cleverly across each narrative (and if you’ve read The Bone Clocks there are plenty of details weaved in from there too), and the ending is satisfying whilst leaving the potential for more.
I wouldn’t jump up and down and beg you to read it, but it is a fun book full of vivid characters and saturated descriptions that kept me wanting to know what was around the corner, through the doorway that surely wasn’t there before, and up the ominous flight of stairs…
Joanna Corbet 