It’s been a long week, and now you deserve to have one day when you can curl up with a good book – let’s call it Lit-urday. How about something creepy, something redolent of the All Hallows unholyday currently passing?
Slade House
by David Mitchell
Random House, 256pp., $26
You can imagine, no doubt, a person – a generic person or a specific person, some Anonymous Genderless Placeholder or, say, a young woman with a hankering for baklava, and the image of a manual typewriter tattooed just below her neck – who might sigh, “Oh, if only Joss Whedon were a bit more literary with his stories.”
Lucky for us all, then.
Certainly lucky for you, me, AGPs, and that girl with the bit of sticky filo dough dangling from her chin.
Because David Mitchell‘s new Slade House is very much as if Joss Whedon were a bit more literary with his stories.
Here’s Mitchell, author of Ghostwritten and number9dream and Cloud Atlas and so on, thick and complex works of varying brilliance all, with a shorter, less intricate opus that plays within the same horror-fraught sandbox as his The Bone Clocks. Which previous novel you don’t have to read to enjoy this new one.
(But, yes: That one’s recommended, too.)
Look: A pair of supernaturally enhanced twins have set up shop in a London neighborhood and are attempting immortality by eating the souls of others. And we follow those others – in first-person, naturally, as the authorially shapeshifting Mitchell is so skilled at and so fond of doing – as their souls are eaten, as they try to escape their fate within the twins’ creepy house of illusions.
There’s a term you might know from the website TV Tropes, if you’ve ever spent an eternity or two wandering among the hallways in that house of allusions: Lampshading. Wherein a character makes note of an implausibility or use of an obvious genre trope, so’s to let the reader know that the author knows that the reader is thinking the narrative has suddenly done something fishy. Because this acknowledgment itself, the idea is, smooths the ruffled reader-pelt and so the story can flow on from there, unimpeded.
Oh, there’s an instance or three of this – lampshading of lampshading, even, IIRC – in Slade House. Whether it’s effective or an irritant or a delight is up to you.
And you should put yourself in a position to have to decide that.
Because, really, whether you’ve read Mitchell’s work before or this will be your first taste of the British author’s oeuvre, if a more-literate-Joss-Whedon-tale sounds at all appealing, then this book is right up your alley – between Cranbury Avenue and Westwood Road, where the twins’ latest orison lies in wait.
This article appears in Attack of the 50-Foot Uterus!.