No handle, no keyhole, but at your touch it swings open. Find the small black iron door set into the right-hand wall. Turn down Slade Alley - narrow, dank and easy to miss, even when you're looking for it. From a possibly autistic 13-year-old boy in 1979 to a gruff police inspector, a lonely undergraduate and her high-powered journalist sister, these special victims fall into the house’s supernatural trap.Born out of the short story David Mitchell published on Twitter in 2014 and inhabiting the same universe as his latest bestselling novel The Bone Clocks, this is the perfect book to curl up with on a dark and stormy night. In each section, characters with psychic powers find that they can access this phantom mansion, where time stops but a terrible fate awaits them.
Although the house was blitzed in 1940, it somehow supplies the venue for episodes that take place first in 1979 and then, at nine-year intervals, up to 2015. In a humdrum city much like Reading, a creeper-clad Georgian rectory called Slade House welcomes visitors who manage to pass through a “small black iron door” in a narrow alleyway. His chosen platform here is the classic English tale of a haunted house. Behind an exuberant fictive spree that one character likens to “a board game co-designed by MC Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever”, Mitchell has some very earthbound worries in his sights. Via their predatory adventures, he counts the cost of “cheating death, cheating ageing, cheating the care home and the dug-up corpse’s face”. In Slade House, a shorter spin-off or suburb of this world, Mitchell again depicts the “parasitic soul-slayers” who chase an ageless existence as “the only prize worth hunting”.
Embedded within the book’s rococo fantasy architecture lay a battle between two battalions of the undead: those “atemporals” who pursue eternal life through the theft of innocent souls, and the “horologists” who treat it as a curse. Last year, in his sixth novel The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell turned all the firepower of his formidable gifts on the lures, and the perils, of immortality.
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