Book Review - David Mitchell's Slade House
Published by: Random House
Publication Date: October 27th, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 238 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy
There is a door. It's small and unassuming. Most people never see it because most of the time it isn't there. But every nine years on the last Saturday of October it's there for the chosen one. Near The Fox and Hounds Pub, Slade Alley is easy to miss. If you don't look carefully you could end up going out the other side wondering how you could have missed the entrance. But through that small door is a beautiful garden leading up to a house. A house that is far too nice for the working class neighborhood the alley is a part of. But then again, you'd never find the house in that neighborhood. It's in a little bubble all it's own, an orison. In 1979 Nathan Bishop is the chosen one. His mother, a pianist, has been asked to perform at Slade House for Lady Norah Grayer. Lady Grayer asked that Nathan be brought along. He spends the day in the garden playing with a boy his age, Jonah. But as they chase each other around the house things begin to shift and change. Nathan is worried that the Valium he snuck from his mother was bad. But it's not the Valium, it's the house. It has lured him in and Norah and Jonah won't let go. Nathan Bishop and his mother are never seen again. Nine years later in 1988 Detective Inspector Gordon Edmonds is looking into the disappearance of Nathan Bishop and his mother because new evidence has surfaced. On the day they disappeared they asked directions from a Fred Pink. Immediately after stepping out of Slade Alley Fred Pink was hit by a car and has spent the intervening years in a coma. When he was catching up on the news that he missed he recognized the Bishops and immediately went to the police. Gordon Edmonds finds Slade House and the beautiful widow Chloe Chetwynd. She uses her feminine wiles to seduce Gordon Edmonds. He is never seen again. In 1997 a group of paranormal investigators made up of college students, one of whom is Fred Pink's nephew, goes missing never to be seen again. In 2006 the sister of one of the missing college student interviews Fred Pink. She to disappears. Like dominoes, each disappearance leads to another and another, stretching back and forward until someone is able to pop the bubble.
Years ago I bought Slade House giddy for a good haunted house story not knowing that it tied heavily into David Mitchell's other book, The Bone Clocks. But then again, all his books tie in. Yet I still thought I should probably do my homework and read The Bone Clocks first. So I put off reading Slade House, and I put off reading it. Then two things happened around the same time, a friend of mine said this book could easily be read as a standalone and I found a copy of The Bone Clocks on the sales table at Barnes and Noble. Thanks for sending me mixed messages universe! So I was basically back at square one. Looking for a good spooky read leading up to Halloween I said fuck it and picked up Slade House and I really wish that I had waited. Typical me would have read The Bone Clocks first. Typical me would have been right. This feels almost like it's the CliffsNotes version of the meticulous worldbuilding that Mitchell has done. There is a literal infodump in the forth chapter that while yes, it makes everything clear, feels too shoehorned in. This information about apertures and orisons and lacunas and psychovoltage feel like they belong to another story. And really, they do. And that is this book's fatal flaw. Yes, you may be given everything you need to know, but it feels shallow. The ending is a literal Deus ex machina where a character from his other books who is from the other feuding immortal faction shows up and puts an end to Norah and Jonah. How is that fair to the readers of this book? It feels not just like Mitchell is cheating the readers of a satisfying ending but is also admonishing them for not doing their homework. I should have known this wasn't likely a book for me because of the comparisons the The Turn of the Screw. My main problem with that story is there is no jeopardy. You know the governess survives. The same could be said here. There is no driving force because every narrator dies so your investment in the characters will never pay off so you quickly learn to disassociate from all of them. And this isn't even going into my issues about how Mitchell handles each decade and the derogatory language he uses. Sure, it's era appropriate, but much like everything to do with this book I could have done without.
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