Ratings84
Average rating3.9
The New York Times bestseller by the author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Named One of the Best Books of the Year by San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, National Post, BookPage, and Kirkus Reviews Keep your eyes peeled for a small black iron door. Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you’ll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won’t want to leave. Later, you’ll find that you can’t. Every nine years, the house’s residents—an odd brother and sister—extend a unique invitation to someone who’s different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a recently divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it’s already too late. . . . Spanning five decades, from the last days of the 1970s to the present, leaping genres, and barreling toward an astonishing conclusion, this intricately woven novel will pull you into a reality-warping new vision of the haunted house story—as only David Mitchell could imagine it. Praise for Slade House “A fiendish delight . . . Mitchell is something of a magician.”—The Washington Post “Entertainingly eerie . . . We turn to [Mitchell] for brain-tickling puzzle palaces, for character studies and for language.”—Chicago Tribune “A ripping yarn . . . Like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House or the Overlook Hotel from Stephen King’s The Shining, [Slade House] is a thin sliver of hell designed to entrap the unwary. . . . As the Mitchellverse grows ever more expansive and connected, this short but powerful novel hints at still more marvels to come.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Like Stephen King in a fever . . . manically ingenious.”—The Guardian (U.K.) “A haunted house story that savors of Dickens, Stephen King, J. K. Rowling and H. P. Lovecraft, but possesses more psychic voltage than any of them.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “Tightly crafted and suspenseful yet warmly human . . . the ultimate spooky nursery tale for adults.”—The Huffington Post
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Inside a black door
near the top of the staircase
a portrait of you.
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I felt very apathetic towards this book and hardly remembered it even the day after I finished it. It just felt very meh to me.
3.5 really. Fun, quick read. He's so good and creating characters and writes so well that I didn't really mind that this wasn't really a novel. More a side yarn that provides back story on some particularly nasty creatures.
I really enjoyed this - the prose is nicely crafted without being overly self-conscious, and the story is creepy and unusual. The narrators are vividly drawn, and even if you don't like one as a person, you get their perspective and sympathize with their plight.
This falls short of a fifth star because it's a little too eager to explain everything that's happening. Norah and Jonah seem to have a compulsion to drop exposition in every conversation. I feel this would have been scarier and a bit more engaging if the reader had the opportunity to work things out, rather than having it dropped in your lap.
Still, I hit “critical mass” with this one about 50% of the way in. So if it had been more engaging, I might have had to take vacation days from work and neglect my children until I was done! Definitely recommended.