Slade House is a very VERY creepy House…

Slade House By David Mitchell

This book arrived and sat a while on my desk; cute, hard backed and with a pretty white and metallic red cover. I had no idea what to expect, and if I hadn’t read the book jacket, it may have hung around a little longer before revealing the hidden creepiness inside.

Every nine years, the house has a visitor; every nine years that visitor never leaves. The occupants of Slade House begin their ‘need’ for visitors in 1979 and this short novel describes each visit and what happens to the unfortunates who push on the hidden back door down Slade Alley and into the garden right up until October 2015.

‘A stranger greets you by name and invites you inside. At first, you won’t want to leave. Later, you’ll find that you can’t.’

This is my first read by David Mitchell and certainly won’t be my last. He is deeply creative, and deliciously descriptive. I have never read that someone’s eyes ‘are as brown as apple pips’ and I have not felt the feeling of suffocation since reading Hugh Howey’s Sand. I read this book in two sittings and it lingered for the whole weekend.

A short novel which dives straight in and works it’s creepy magic. I would recommend to anyone who likes an intricate story and a story that will chill your bones. Who thought a gem like this could come from a 140 character tweet!

4 stars from me

#newbooks#bookworm#creepybooks

Slade House Book Blurb

Prepare to be chilled, electrified and entertained – a gem of a novel from ‘one of the most brilliantly inventive writers of this, or any country’ (Independent).  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.

Turn down Slade Alley – narrow, dank and easy to miss, even when you’re looking for it. Find the small black iron door set into the right-hand wall. No handle, no keyhole, but at your touch it swings open. Enter the sunlit garden of an old house that doesn’t quite make sense; too grand for the shabby neighbourhood, too large for the space it occupies.
A stranger greets you by name and invites you inside. At first, you won’t want to leave. Later, you’ll find that you can’t.

Slade House is an unnerving, taut and intricately woven tale by one of our most original and bewitching writers which begins in 1979 and reaches its turbulent conclusion around Hallowe’en, 2015. Because every nine years, on the last Saturday of October, a ‘guest’ is summoned to Slade House. But why has that person been chosen, by whom and for what purpose? The answers lie waiting in the long attic, at the top of the stairs…