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Follows the narrative of five different people who disappear through a mysterious door in an unassuming alleyway that leads to Slade House, owned by a peculiar brother and sister, and vanish completely from the outside world. Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you'll find the entrance to Slade House: a surreal place where visitors see what they want to see, including some things that should be impossible. Every nine years, the house's residents--an odd brother and sister--extend a unique invitation to someone who's different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it's already too late.… (more)
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Mr. Mitchell’s best-known and most ambitious novel is “Cloud Atlas” (2004), a suite of
His most recent novel, “The Bone Clocks” (2014), was nearly as ambitious but felt like a misfire. His gifts were put in service of a plot — there were psychic powers, creepy villains, an epic showdown between good and evil — that felt soft and formulaic.
This was a pastiche of second-rate fantasy fiction that actually read, quite often, like second-rate fantasy fiction. Mr. Mitchell’s intertextual gamesmanship — the recurring characters and so on — began to seem, as a friend said to me, “less like Yoknapatawpha and more like Marvel.”
Mr. Mitchell’s slim new novel, “Slade House,” is a sequel of sorts to “The Bone Clocks,” although it’s closer to being a sly footnote. It first came to life as a short story, “The Right Sort,” which the author published in 140-character snippets on Twitter. It’s grown into something more.
On a macro level, “Slade House” plunges us again into a battle between two blocs of immortals. One group consists of soul vampires; humans must die for them to live. The other is vastly more pleasant.
On a micro level, this can make for malevolent fun. A pair of immortal twins, Jonah and Norah, occupy — or appear to occupy — a grand old pile in downtown London, accessible only through a small metal door in an alleyway. It opens very rarely, and when it does, it admits a victim.
Once they’ve found an acceptable soul to suck, the twins share it as if it were a milkshake into which two straws have been sunk. We’re given tasting notes. “A sprinkle of last-minute despair,” Jonah comments, “gives a soul an agreeably earthy aftertaste.”
After killing and inhaling the soul of a loutish cop, “The twins gasp and let out soft groans like junkies shooting up when the drug hits the bloodstream.” By the time the officer saw something, it was too late to say anything.
“Slade House” is told in five chapters, spaced nine years apart. The first takes place in 1979, the last in 2015. In each chapter, a victim enters the compound. Muggles will not do. The twins need “engifted” humans with potent “psychovoltage.”
Mr. Mitchell tips this book into some dark corners. One character is made to viscerally understand how suffering is much worse if someone you love disappears rather than simply dies.
“Grief is an amputation,” this woman says, “but hope is incurable hemophilia: You bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger’s cat inside a box you can never ever open.”
Mr. Mitchell remains a fluent and, when he wishes to be, witty writer. It is hard to disapprove of a novel in which one of the most likable characters is a young woman named Sally Timms, clearly in homage to a lead singer in the venerable British punk band the Mekons.
As this book moves deeper into the fripperies of its ghost story, Mr. Mitchell is savvy enough to have his characters, every so often, blow raspberries at the expense of all the solemnity. “This is all sounding a bit ‘Da Vinci Code’ for me,” one says. And: “What I see is the wackometer needle climbing.”
Alas, the wackometer needle does climb. Characters deliver big chunks of artless exposition so readers can keep up with metaphysical nuances. The dialogue often has a Lovecraft-meets-Hardy Boys flavor: “Something bad’s happening in this house, Sal. We need to get out.”
“Slade House” is Mr. Mitchell’s shortest and most accessible novel to date, and you don’t have to have read “The Bone Clocks” to comprehend it. Readers who come to this book first, however, will get only a slivery glimpse of this writer’s talent. Our seats are the intellectual version of “obstructed view,” as cheap theater tickets sometimes say.
The biggest drawback of “Slade House” might that it simply isn’t very scary. These characters aren’t alive enough for us to fear for them when they’re in peril. With the possible exception of Sally Timms, we’re not invested in them.
As it happens, I read this novel alone and mostly at night in a fairly remote cabin in upstate New York. There’s no cellphone reception here.
I’m as susceptible to scary stories as the next person. After seeing “The Blair Witch Project,” I wouldn’t go on my back porch alone at night, even to smoke, for two months. But “Slade House” slid right off me, even as the wind howled outside.
In “Cloud Atlas,” Mr. Mitchell wrote: “Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.” Fear belongs on that list, too.