Slade House

A headlong adrenaline-rush of a new novel from one of our most beloved and original writers: Slade House, which has its origins in Mitchell's famously Twitter-released short story last year, is his most entertaining and accessible novel yet. A cycle of linked ghost stories perfect for any dark and stormy night.     An ordinary road in a town like yours: bus routes and red-brick houses. A dank narrow alley, easy to miss, even when you're looking for it. A small black metal door set into the wall: no handle, no keyhole, but at your touch it opens onto a sunlit garden, sloping up to a house that doesn't quite make sense... Go through, and the door closes discreetly behind you. In David Mitchell's exhilarating new novel, five "guests" separated by nine years enter Slade House for a brief visit--only to vanish without trace from the outside world. Who draws them to the heart of Slade House, and why is the house missing from maps? Beginning in 1979 and ending in 2015, these five interlacing narratives will enchant Mitchell's readers, old and new, with a signature blend of mystery, realism and the supernatural.

Brian Bethune, Maclean’s

“This compulsively readable, immersive novel is many things, but is mainly another brick in David Mitchell’s wall. . . . Mitchell is a detail obsessive, the mark of a storyteller, literary or genre.”

National Post (Best Book)

“Another genre-bending rush from the writer who does it best. Mitchell tackles gothic horror in his latest, where an old haunted house is the link between a cycle of fearful short stories that span decades.”

Philip Marchand, National Post

“[A]n example of contemporary Gothic literature. . . . Mitchell works hard to make his fictional world coherent and logical. . . . This is a work which leaves a powerful trace of feeling in its wake, a chilling story that makes our ordinary human environment seem sinister.”

ELLE Canada

“This addictive thriller will make you hesitate the next time an acquaintance invites you over. Haunted houses have nothing on this warped alleyway.”

Jocelyn McClurg, USA Today

“A fresh twist on the haunted house genre.”

James Bradley, The Sydney Morning Herald

“With its images of summer gardens and aristocratic decline, Slade House draws on the tradition of classic ghost stories that runs back through M.R. James to Henry James and others, yet as always with Mitchell, it is also able to be read as part of the larger tapestry formed by his increasingly interconnected body of work. . . . [T]here’s no denying the pleasure associated with watching its author unspool his narrative, or the expansiveness of the sympathy he extends to his wounded, awkward, engagingly flawed characters.”

Brian Finney, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Like most of [David Mitchell’s] novels Slade House is a page-turner, fast paced, hard to put down. And yet it is tightly constructed, offers a cast of varied, vividly portrayed characters . . . . This is what makes Mitchell so unusual: he combines literary sophistication with a talent for telling the kind of gripping story we normally associate with popular novelists.”

each one being just as jaded, just as suspicious and just as disbelieving of all this nonsense as we are. Right up until they realize that the trap has been sprung on them, too.”

“‘Beautifully twisty’ is pretty much David Mitchell’s trademark, and Slade House does nothing to tarnish his rep. It’s a horror novel (which is something you just don’t see that much anymore) that covers the years 1979 to 2015, told with shifting main characters. And while there may be a bit of goofiness living at its heart, it’s still a worthy read simply because Mitchell is very aware of every trick he’s lifting from a thousand scary stories come before, and so are his characters

Daily Express

“[D]eliciously eerie. . . . It is all brilliantly done, spooky, tense and beautifully written, full of the writerly flourishes that Mitchell is rightly famous for.”

The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

“Every nine years, shape-shifting twins lure victims to their haunted home to extend their immortality in Mitchell’s ingenious novel.”

Jess Zimmerman, The New Republic

“[Mitchell is] like a sumi-e master of voice, sketching beautifully detailed characters with a few lightning-fast flicks of the brush.”

The Lady

“For too long David Mitchell has been known as the ‘author of Cloud Atlas.’ Hereafter it should be ‘author of Slade House,’ given the marvellously horrific, sharp and concise masterpiece he has delivered. Its brevity should not lead the reader to underestimate just how much punch Mitchell’s prose packs. His fiction is intoxicating and his ideas are hauntingly vampiric.”

old house, dark alley, missing person

“[A]n elegant fright-fest of the highest order. . . . Mitchell masterfully, humorously, combines the classic components of a scary story

Malcom Forbes, Financial Times

“[P]acked with heady ideas and pulsing with dark energy. . . . [D]azzlingly inventive and compulsively readable.”

painstakingly imagined and crackling with narrative velocity, it’s a Dracula for the new millennium, a Hansel and Gretel for grownups, a reminder of how much fun fiction can be.”

“I gulped down this novel in a single evening. Intricately connected to Mitchell’s previous books, this compact fantasy burns with classic Mitchell-ian energy

if not the finest

“David Mitchell’s Slade House is a deranged garden of forking paths, where all the flowers are poisonous, and every escape is choked with thorns. Mitchell has long been acknowledged as one of the finest

Daniel Handler, New York Times  bestselling author of We Are Pirates and The Lemony Snicket series

“Sharp, fast, flat-out spooky, Slade House is such a hypnotic read that you are likely to miss your subway stop in order to keep reading.  And by you, I mean me.”

Dean Koontz, 14-time #1 New York Times  bestselling author

“David Mitchell doesn’t break rules so much as he proves them to be inhibitors to lively intelligent fiction. Slade House is a fractal offshoot crystallizing from his remarkable The Bone Clocks, an eerie haunted-house tale that takes as much from quantum mechanics as from traditional supernatural lore, a spellbinding chiller about an unnatural greed for life and the arrogance of power.”

step inside.”

“What can’t David Mitchell do? Slade House is a page-burning, read-in-one-sitting, at times terrifying novel that does for the haunted house story what Henry James did for the ghost story in The Turn of the Screw. It has all the intelligence and linguistic dazzle of a David Mitchell novel, but this one will also creep the pants off you. Just as Slade House won’t let go of its unsuspecting guests, you won’t be able to put this book down. Welcome to Slade House

Library Journal

“Fans of [David] Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas will recognize the interlocking narrative structure and literary-fantastical bent of this new work. . . . Pitched as his most accessible book yet, but, really, who doesn’t want to just drink up all of Mitchell’s writing?”

About the Author

DAVID MITCHELL is the award-winning and bestselling author of The Bone Clocks, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream and Ghostwritten. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mitchell was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine in 2007 ("The most consistently interesting novelist of his generation," TIME). With KA Yoshida, Mitchell co-translated from the Japanese the international bestselling memoir, The Reason I Jump. He lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.

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