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Slade House

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Slade House

By: David Mitchell
Narrated by: Tania Rodrigues, Thomas Judd
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About this listen

Prepare to be chilled, electrified and entertained - a gem of a novel from 'one of the most brilliantly inventive writers of this, or any country' (Independent).

Walk down narrow, clammy Slade Alley. Open the black iron door in the right-hand wall. Enter the sunlit garden of an old house that doesn't exactly make sense. A stranger greets you by name and invites you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Too late, you find you can't....

A taut, intricately woven, reality-warping tale that begins in 1979 and comes to its turbulent conclusion at the wintry end of October 2015. Born out of the short story David Mitchell published on Twitter in 2014 and inhabiting the same universe as his latest best-selling novel The Bone Clocks, this is the perfect book to curl up with on a dark and stormy night.

©2015 David Mitchell (P)2015 Hodder & Stoughton Classics Fantasy Fiction Genre Fiction Horror Literary Fiction Science Fiction Scary

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All stars
Most relevant  
Really enjoyed this - enough to write a review. It's well written and well told. Sure, it has some standard cliches and archetypal characters, but to be honest, that just helps the story race along! No need to think, just sit back and enjoy a non-challenging, high speed, stories within a story trip!

A great little supernatural tale!

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A dark and clever intrigue where you are just willing the characters not to fall into the trap. Dark but fun

Scintillatingly mysterious and clever

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It’s rather strange to read this kind of literary PS, or side quest, after reading the truly magnificent The Bone Clocks. It feels like chapters Mitchell left out of the Bone Clocks and popped together for a Halloween release, or perhaps some fulfilling of a publisher contract obligation? It’s nice, but it’s a brief addendum more than a novel. Like an aspartame-filled diet soda - kind of makes you thirstier and hungrier and a tad dissatisfied than before you started it.
I enjoyed it, but hungering for another Bone Clocks.

Superfluous follow up to the magnificent The Bone Clocks

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This was a great listen over half term. Fast paced, packed with cultural stereotypes and plenty of gung ho action. Like a 1950 western there was no effort to get to know the enemy, they were just out there and meaning to cause us harm. There were white hat goodies and black hatted baddies. Everyone got what they deserved. The English character was played by a space Celia Johnson from Brief encounter, an english rose in uniform....lovely stuff!
This was just one layer thick.....I wanted to know about motivations but realised I had picked the wrong novel for philosophizing over. Captain Wolf just wanted to bomb the bastards.
BUT it was not taxing and a good listen for a tired teacher brain over half term.

good old fashioned space western

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“A companion” to the bone clocks they say,
Although For the most part it stands alone as a quirky murder mystery with a difference.

Entertaining and tense.

A worthy sidestep

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I'm a bit sceptical when it comes to 'horror' audiobooks, however, I was pleasantly surprised by this creepy unnerving tale. With a great balance of fantastic dialogue and narration, the story was not overloaded with clichés and almost held all the way through. The narrators were fantastic, hearing a clear change between the numerous characters. As much as I enjoyed the book, it seem to lose the plot, so to speak, by the end, terminating abruptly. It would have been a full five stars otherwise.

Curiousity definitely killed the cat

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What made the experience of listening to Slade House the most enjoyable?

The narrators were very good, and each voice clear and separate character.

What did you like best about this story?

I liked how all the stories intertwined.

Did you have an emotional reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

It scared me!! Very spooky read!

Any additional comments?

I'd recommend this book. It's not as long or complex as his other novels but I don't see why that's a bad thing. It's different but it's still good. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Loved it!

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Really enjoyed the first few chapters, but then it started to plod and drag on. Lost is spark - I was disappointed.

Good first two thirds, then really dragged.

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great story from a man who is adept at great stories. well read although the transition from one voice to another is a little jarring it is necessary.

beautifully constructed.

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Skip to the last sentence of the last paragraph, turn left, back away slowly and that’s my review in a nutshell, no greater harm done to the reader. If you start from the beginning, however, you might notice that I’m rambling. Help is on its way.

The thing is, people keep telling me it’s already a year since ”The Bone Clocks”, David Mitchell’s latest lengthy metaphysical romp à la ”Cloud Atlas”, but I just can’t believe it. Surely it was just yesterday that I finished it, and I had to have it the day it came out. Time is out of joint, surely. Warped, even.

Yet so it goes that again, as my drives to work grow darker morning after another, and the black starlit sky makes it seem like the moon’s floating so close it’s there for the taking, Mr Mitchell starts to reappear in my dreams. This time it’s a shorter piece, a ”companion volume” to last year’s osseous timepiece. One might be tempted to disregard this one as a mere trifling afterthought, but that’s not exactly appropriate. The thing is, no matter how much I like his books, I just found ”The Bone Clocks” too long. I felt like it had said what there was to be said, and still kept saying it. Or then I’m just a git. Be that as it may, the slender appearance of ”Slade House” sure was inviting.

The premise is delicious. A mysterious ghost story of a haunted house that seems to exist in a sort of parallel, metaphysical dimension that’s only occasionally accessible. Wonderful stuff!

The book gets on wonderfully. ”The Right Sort” is irresistibly tasty. The constant sense of something askew lingers behind every page. Everything about it is perfect. ”Shining Armour” is almost as good. These stories attack you right away. No explanations, not even an attempt at a discussion or a friendly warning. It is indeed the sort of work the dark evenings of late autumn and winter were created for. In terms of its metaphysical aspirations it wouldn’t be too dissimilar to Philip K. Dick’s explorations of reality, or Murakami’s wild existential labyrinths. But on the other hand, it aligns itself well with the classical tradition of literary horror, be it Western (Lovecraft, Poe) or Asian (”Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio”, ”Tales of Moonlight and Rain”).

But by the third story, ”Oink Oink”, it has become apparent exactly how deep-rooted ”Slade House” is in ”The Bone Clocks”. This means that ultimately the mystery aspect vanishes, and almost half of the work is spent waiting how the inevitable resolution, itself equally apparent as seen in the context of last year’s novel, will pan out. ”You Dark Horse You” and ”Astronaut” wrap the story up, but now it’s become more exposition than anything, and the nature of the novel has changed dramatically. The suspense is gone.

As such, I admit I’m let down. Three-fifths of a great thing leaves so much to be desired for since you know how good the whole thing would have tasted. I felt like a new and adventurous road was opening up ahead of me, only turning into the one I travel to work every single day. I seriously need to listen to ”Black Swan Green” to try to get back on track, since this is the second Mitchell in a row I’ve been critical about. Help is on its way.

The work of Thomas Judd and Tania Rodrigues warrants mention. Although I’m not too partial to Rodrigues’s delivery of ”Oink Oink”, what’s good about their narration is how they’re treading with a light step, something inherent in the text as well. This feels, after all, a bit like the hypersensory extravagance of ”Hausu” (1977), where everything in the genre comes together, goes through a whirl in a blender and is splattered on the wall in an explosion of style and characterization. At times, though, it feels a bit too elaborate, a similar problem I’m having with Dick Hill’s reading of ”Against the Day”, whose performance everybody seems to love.

I think much will be written about whether ”Slade House” is really a novel, a novella, a collection of short stories or something else entirely. But as a work of fiction, it keeps it short and sweet, at least for the most part. Those who have been enthusiastic about ”The Bone Clocks” will probably be enthusiastic about ”Slade House” much for the same reasons.

Hypersensory Extravagance

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