Mitchell has never hesitated to appropriate the tropes of a genre if they serve his purposes, and with Slade House he does it again, this time following in the footsteps of Poe, Lovecraft, and King with obvious delight. If this sounds like the setup for a horror story, that’s because it is. What happens to the Engifted inside the house isn’t for the faint of heart. Only a special type of person can unlock the magical door in the alley-a person “Engifted” with psychic powers. The door leads through a brick wall to a sprawling garden much too big for the neighborhood, and at the far end of the garden sits an imposing Victorian manor-Slade House-that somehow can’t be seen from the street. Each part details the fate of a different character as he or she is drawn to a mysterious black iron door that appears every nine years, as if by magic, in a narrow alley off Westwood Road in London. Slade House, the latest novel by David Mitchell, is a story in five parts.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |