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Dark Alleys and Soul Vampires: David Mitchell’s Slade House

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This review contains minor spoilers for Slade House. The first surprising thing about David Mitchell’s new novel, Slade House, is how slim it is. Most of Mitchell’s novels could be used as dumbbells in a pinch – his last novel, The Bone Clocks, ran to 609 pages – but Slade House barely breaks 200 pages. In this way, the form reflects the content: while Mitchell’s stories often stretch between continents and across centuries, Slade House is a small, focused story about a magical house and the two immortal vampires who live there. Every nine years, a small door appears in an alleyway in downtown London, and a particular person is lured inside Slade House, a crumbling but expansive mansion. What they find inside the house differs from person to person, but the end goal is the same: the house’s inhabitants, a pair of immortal twins, want to lure their victims into a false sense of security so that the twins can devour their soul. To tell the stories of the twins’ victims, Mitchell borrows a technique from Ira Levin’s underrated debut novel A Kiss Before Dying, an inverted detective story that followed a serial killer as he moved from victim to victim in sequence. In that book, the first murder set the template, and after that, it was the variations and improvisations that created the suspense and horror. In Slade House, each chapter follows a different victim, and for the most part, the template is the same: the character finds the door, enters the house, is tempted with a vision, and falls into the twins’ psychic trap. But as in A Kiss Before Dying, it’s the ways in which each story deviates from the prior chapters that make Slade House so enjoyable. Slade House is being billed as a horror novel, but while the atmosphere that Mitchell creates is creepy, there are few outright scares. Instead, the horror of the story comes from the sickening specificity of the visions that the twins use as lures. As each character explores the house, we come to know them through their greatest desires: the shy teenage boy encounters a friend, the cocky policeman finds a lonely widow. Mitchell has always delighted in the creation of his protagonists; there’s an exhilarating generosity of perspective to his novels. Each of the characters that he inhabits in Slade House is flawed and admirable in their own way, and he gives you just enough time to fall in love with each character before the other shoe drops. Slade House is a semi-sequel to Mitchell’s 2014 novel The Bone Clocks – it’s set in the same universe and a character from The Bone Clocks pops up at one point. Weirdly, that might be the novel’s biggest flaw. It’s not necessary to read The Bone Clocks to enjoy Slade House, but it definitely helps. And as the book wraps up, it becomes difficult to shake the feeling that Mitchell is a little over-invested in his shared universe, in a way that weakens the ultimate impact of Slade House. But it’s hard to begrudge Mitchell his indulgences when the end result is so much fun. People coming to Slade House expecting another Cloud Atlas are going to be disappointed. But for the rest of us, Slade House is a spooky and entertaining tale that will make you think twice about ducking down any dark alleys in the near future.


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