Slade House

It's not necessary to listen to THE BONE CLOCKS in order to thoroughly enjoy this sequel. Top-notch narrators Thomas Judd and Tania Rodrigues give amazing performances of Mitchell's wildly original characters and surreal situations. A sinister brother and sister invite certain young people to Slade House. Each person who accepts the invitation--a preteen boy, a college girl, a cop--becomes important to us just before the unthinkable happens. Meanwhile, the war is still going on between the compassionate Horologists, helpers of humankind, and the ominous, self-serving Anchorites. Both narrators make the creepy moments in this genre-bending haunted-house mystery memorable. David Mitchell's divine fiction is bigger on the inside. The deeper you go, the more there is. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

July 13, 2015
Mitchell’s latest novel is his shortest and lightest to date, and it functions as a sort of entry-level offering from the author of hugely ambitious novels such as Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks. Unfortunately, it gives Mitchell’s fans far too little of a good thing. Tucked into an alley behind a British dive bar is the sprawling and mysterious Slade House, inhabited by the soul-eating, shape-shifting Grayer Twins. In episodes that begin in 1979 and end in the present, they lure a succession of human hosts into their Wonderland-like abode. First there’s a geeky teen and his mother, then a hard-boiled detective and a crew of New Wave ghost hunters, followed by a backstory-heavy section framed as an interview with an expert on the case. All will eventually enter the mind-bending architecture of Slade House and engage in psychic warfare with its denizens. There is a solid haunted-house book in here somewhere, but it’s wedged intermittently into a surfeit of quirk, repetition, and esoteric dialogue that’s very hard to take seriously without a more solid foundation. It all builds up to the requisite wizard duel between the Twins and the formidable Iris Marinus-Levy, who will be familiar to readers of The Bone Clocks. The high degree of self-reference—and the skipping through genre and time—is trademark Mitchell, but the constant rehashing of what is already a pretty thin plot means that this offering fails to really stand up on its own, or to add anything new to the Mitchell-verse.