Slade House

By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | A Publishers Weekly Literary Fiction Top 10 Pick for Fall 2015

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.

Advance praise for Slade House

“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

“David Mitchell doesn’t break rules so much as prove them inhibitors to lively, intelligent fiction. Slade House is a fractal offshoot of his remarkable The Bone Clocks, an eerie haunted-house tale that takes as much from quantum mechanics as from traditional supernatural lore, a spellbinding chiller about an unnatural greed for life and the arrogance of power.” — Dean Koontz, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“Slade House is a deranged garden of forking paths, where all the flowers are poisonous and every escape is choked with thorns. David Mitchell has long been acknowledged as one of the finest — if not the finest — literary minds of his generation, but he’s also one of the most suspenseful, and he proves it in every gripping, vertiginous setpiece.” — Joe Hill, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Horns

“What can’t David Mitchell do? Slade House is a page-burning, read-in-one-sitting, at times terrifying novel that does for the haunted-house story what Henry James did for the ghost story in The Turn of the Screw. It has all the intelligence and linguistic dazzle one expects from a David Mitchell novel, but it will also creep the pants off you.” — Adam Johnson, author of Fortune Smiles and The Orphan Master’s Son, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“Sharp, fast, flat-out spooky, Slade House is such a hypnotic read that you are likely to miss your subway stop in order to keep reading. And by you, I mean me.” — Daniel Handler, New York Times bestselling author of the Lemony Snicket series

“Fans of Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas will recognize the interlocking narrative structure and literary-fantastical bent of this new work.” — Library Journal