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A review by matthewcpeck
Slade House by David Mitchell
3.0
"Slade House" is a compact baby sibling to David Mitchell's previous novel, "The Bone Clocks". It features the same supernatural combatants, as well as other names and locations from the ever-expanding Mitchellverse. A reading of the previous book enhances "Slade House", but it's not required: "Slade House" stands independently as a sleek, fast-moving horror/fantasy.
The novel consists of chapters separated by nine-year intervals, all set in or around the titular manor, which appears to exist in a physically impossible location behind a small iron door in a winding alley in an unnamed English suburb. A procession of narrators - the most memorable are a near-autistic boy and an introverted university student - find themselves drawn to Slade House for varying reasons. After reality seems to disintegrate, they each face the same bleak fate at the mercy of a pair of soul-eating, immortal twins.
When Mitchell is building up the mystery in the first half of the book, it's quite unsettling and fun. He's a really good writer -sometimes a little too skilled, as the character and setting introductions at the start of each chapter seem almost machine-made in their smoothness. But those characters can often be quite affecting, and his ability at conveying a creeping, peripheral weirdness is reminiscent of full-time master fantasists like Kelly Link and Neil Gaiman. The thing is, though, that Link and Gaiman know how fantasy can be strengthened by withholding information. The last 3rd of "Slade House", like "The Bone Clocks" before it, is largely made up of overcooked expository dialogue that seems like it should be in a comic-book bubble positioned above the head of a supervillain with a leering grin.
I hope that "Slade House" and "The Bone Clocks" will represent a brief side trip in David Mitchell's career, and that he returns to the sensibility of his wondrous earlier novels. But like an immortal soul-eater, I will continue to greedily eat up whatever stories he tells, with no regrets.
The novel consists of chapters separated by nine-year intervals, all set in or around the titular manor, which appears to exist in a physically impossible location behind a small iron door in a winding alley in an unnamed English suburb. A procession of narrators - the most memorable are a near-autistic boy and an introverted university student - find themselves drawn to Slade House for varying reasons. After reality seems to disintegrate, they each face the same bleak fate at the mercy of a pair of soul-eating, immortal twins.
When Mitchell is building up the mystery in the first half of the book, it's quite unsettling and fun. He's a really good writer -sometimes a little too skilled, as the character and setting introductions at the start of each chapter seem almost machine-made in their smoothness. But those characters can often be quite affecting, and his ability at conveying a creeping, peripheral weirdness is reminiscent of full-time master fantasists like Kelly Link and Neil Gaiman. The thing is, though, that Link and Gaiman know how fantasy can be strengthened by withholding information. The last 3rd of "Slade House", like "The Bone Clocks" before it, is largely made up of overcooked expository dialogue that seems like it should be in a comic-book bubble positioned above the head of a supervillain with a leering grin.
I hope that "Slade House" and "The Bone Clocks" will represent a brief side trip in David Mitchell's career, and that he returns to the sensibility of his wondrous earlier novels. But like an immortal soul-eater, I will continue to greedily eat up whatever stories he tells, with no regrets.