Slade House, David Mitchell
Slade House, David Mitchell
8 Rating(s)
List: $17.50 | Sale: $12.25
Club: $8.75

Slade House

Author: David Mitchell

Narrator: Thomas Judd, Tania Rodrigues

Unabridged: 6 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/27/2015


Synopsis

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

About David Mitchell

English born author, David Stephen Mitchell is a novelist and screenwriter. He was born in Southport and raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, where he attended Hanley Castle High School. He also attended and graduated from the University of Kent, with a degree in English and American literature. He then completed his M.A. in Comparative Literature.

Mitchell has lived in different areas of the world. He lived for a year in Sicily, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan where he taught English for eight years. He then returned to England to focus his efforts on writing, and became financially capable of earning a living with his writing.

Mitchell has awards and best sellers from his body of work: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream, Ghostwritter and The Bone Clocks. After the release of his novel adapted for screen, Cloud Atlas, Mitchell became a screenwriter. In collaboration with others, he wrote the series finale of the television series, Sense8, and for the film Matrix 4. He and his wife live in Ireland with their two children.


Reviews

Goodreads review by karen on June 23, 2018

so, whoopsie! i read this thinking it was a standalone book (inasmuch as any david mitchell books are standalones), but it actually takes place in the same world as The Bone Clocks, which i am already ashamed about not having read (yet) and am now re-shamed by this book's exposing me to creatures an......more

Goodreads review by Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽ on October 07, 2019

One of my favorite creepy horror novels! Review first posted at www.fantasyliterature.com: The enigmatic Slade House mysteriously appears every nine years for a day, like a sinister Brigadoon, accessible only to certain people. And those who visit it are never seen again. Some of the characters were......more

Goodreads review by Candi on November 07, 2016

I picked up Slade House with the idea of reading something creepy and perhaps slightly unusual before Halloween. As it turned out, it was nightmarish and positively bizarre! I was mostly entertained while reading this, but as I now try to write my review, I realize that not much of this has stuck wi......more

Goodreads review by Mohammed on August 10, 2017

A Cursed Eternity, Soul Eaters, Dark Cult, Gifted Characters & A Lacuna. You can clearly hear a X-Files Theme playing here.. Five Stories, One House. A mysterious Black Iron door appears to you out of high brick walled alley, only on a certain day every 9 years.. Step inside ,for your own good, with you......more

Goodreads review by Christine on November 07, 2015

2.5 stars I wish to thank Net Galley, Random House and author David Mitchell for the privilege of reading an ARC of Slade House in exchange for an unbiased review. This is my first David Mitchell read, and I will probably leave it at that. I basically had a hard time connecting with this book. If I ha......more


Quotes

“A fiendish delight . . . [David] 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.)
 
Slade House, the tricky new confection by David Mitchell, is 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, Slade House is the ultimate spooky nursery tale for adults.”The Huffington Post
 
“The joy in Slade House is in the discovery. It’s in seeing different people make the same mistakes over and over again. . . . It’s in thinking that you’d be smarter, of course. That you’d see through all this B-movie schlock (like creepy portraits, sad ghosts and stairways that go nowhere), find the secret door, and escape. Only to find that you’re already trapped.”—NPR
 
“Diabolically entertaining . . . dark, thrilling, and fun . . . One needn’t have read any of Mitchell’s past books to enjoy Slade House. Those who do crack it open will find inside a thoroughly entertaining ride full of mind games, unexpected twists, and even a few laughs.”The Daily Beast
 
“A smart, spooky thrill ride . . . If you haven’t yet read Mitchell, choosing this novel just might make a believer of you.”Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Plants died, milk curdled, and my children went slightly feral as I succumbed to the creepy magic of David Mitchell’s Slade House. It’s a wildly inventive, chilling, and—for all its otherworldliness—wonderfully human haunted house story. I plan to return to its clutches quite often.”—Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl and The Grownup 

“I gulped down this novel in a single evening. Intricately connected to David Mitchell’s previous books, this compact fantasy burns with classic Mitchellian energy. Painstakingly imagined and crackling with narrative velocity, it’s a Dracula for the new millennium, a Hansel and Gretel for grownups, a reminder of how much fun fiction can be.”—Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize