There are good and bad things for me about reading (and reviewing) thrillers. Good, because I have an unquenchable thirst for being thoroughly frightened by fiction. Bad, because that fear has to be realised in an environment where I feel safe – other adults around, the scary bits wrapped up before bed, and so on. I read David Mitchell’s Slade House while surrounded by much of my extended family; I still found myself piling my children into my own bed at the end of the evening, ostensibly to keep them safe from Mitchell’s haunted house and soul-sucking vampires, but if I’m honest, it was really all about me.
Set in the universe of Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, where humans live unknowingly alongside immortals, it opens as a boy and his mother search along a narrow, high-walled alleyway in an anonymous town for the entrance to Slade House. It’s not there, and then a small black door appears, “black, nothing-black, like the gaps between stars”. On the other side is a stately old home that doesn’t quite fit into the shabby neighbourhood – or into the space in which it lies.
The boy, Nathan, is the first to be lured to Slade House by Mitchell’s evil twins Norah and Jonah Grayer, who “use human beings like disposable gloves” in their quest for “life everlasting”, disdaining “a bone clock’s snatched, wasted, tawdry handful of decades”. Entering their home, Nathan heads upstairs. “Krunk... kronk... krunk... kronk goes the clock... It has no hands. It’s got words instead, on its old, pale as bone clock face, saying time is and under that time was and under that time is not.”
Split into sections, from 1979 to the present day, the novel follows the fate of the psychic victims that “soul vampires” Norah and Jonah entice to Slade House every nine years to sustain them: grumpy detective inspector Gordon Edmonds; overweight student Sally Timms, who joins her university’s paranormal society in a quest to make friends; her journalist sister Freya, who comes looking for her; and Canadian psychiatrist Dr Iris Marinus-Fenby, whom we’ve seen before. All are deeply realised characters, despite the small space allotted to them, Sally in particular resonating long after she leaves the page.
“People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go,” she says, hitting the mark much more closely than she realises, as her world spirals into insanity and as she remains thoroughly likable. Spotting the clock, as she climbs the stairs of Slade House, she’s amusingly unimpressed. “Highly metaphysical; deeply useless.”
It’s not as if the novel, Mitchell’s seventh, had the most salubrious birth: it started out as a Twitter story, but sprouted into a book that runs to more than 200 pages. It’s not even as if Mitchell is venturing into the realms of dazzling originality: this is a classic haunted house story, touching all the motifs we’d expect – dark alleyways, creepy paintings, a fog-bound manor house described by Sally as like “a board game co-designed by MC Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever”, even impossible flights through dreamscapes: “It’s like running through water; rose-thorns scratch my eyes; a bucking path trips us; damson trees claw us and a shrubbery billows up and its roots try to hook our ankles.” And in its explanation of the Shaded Way, the occult route Norah and Jonah have taken to their attempted immortality, there’s a tendency to veer into too much detail – even for a reader who loves this sort of thing.
But for all that, Slade House is still one of the most enjoyably, deliriously frightening novels I’ve read in ages. There’s always acres of soul-searching when it comes to Mitchell and exactly which genre we should put him in. Judging by the contained, gleeful, skin-crawling brilliance of Slade House, his publishers should be pushing him towards the “scary Halloween story” slot as often as they can.
Slade House is published by Sceptre (£12.99). Click here to order a copy for £10.39
