Oh, lovely treat for Halloween. “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. M.C. Escher called his confounding 1953 drawing of staircases “Relativity,” and readers will need to suspend their notions of time and space as they cross the portal into Slade House. After all, as the grandfather clock on the landing of one of those infinitely rising and falling staircases tells visitors unlucky enough to read its pale face, “time was, time is, time is not.”
Random House ($26).
The Grayer twins (darker by far than Dorian) invite guests to their house every nine years on the last Saturday in October. Only the right sort of guest can find the small black iron door in Slade Alley that is its entrance, and in the first chapter, Nathan Bishop, an engaging 13-year-old on the autism spectrum, is that guest. Nathan’s been dragged there by his mother, who’s so keen to get some career help from Lady Grayer that she brushes off the curious incident of the dead cat in the alley, or the fact that it’s late October, yet the door opens onto a “buzzing, still-summery garden.”
Jonah and Norah Grayer seem charming and so welcoming, but it’s weird how much Jonah knows about Nathan — his parents’ divorce, his longing to visit his dad in Africa, and those terrible nightmares he has about a black dog attacking him. Nathan figures it’s just the Valium he popped, but we readers know better. Oh, how we wish he wouldn’t eat that damson Jonah offers him!
But in haunted house narratives, visitors always do what they shouldn’t, and Mr. Mitchell the magician ensures we remain captives of his imagination. If you already know and love his work, you’ll recognize this story as an offshoot of last year’s “The Bone Clocks.” Although, actually, it preceded it. Mr. Mitchell tweeted the opening chapter last summer just as he is now tweeting the back story of one of the characters in the current book. I’m no fan of Twitter, but certainly it allows Mr. Mitchell to wormhole us to locations all over the Internet. And what an intratextual boon for him: Some of the links lead to movies about his own characters, to books within books, a fictional world without end, amen. Forgive him this bit of self-marketing, because David Mitchell is the best thing to happen to narrative since Daniel Defoe.
Who else can conduct such an orchestra of distinct voices? This novel alone puts us in the heads of three ancient time travelers, a neuro-atypical boy, a bigoted London cop, a fashionable gay journalist, and, my favorite character, Sally, a plump college girl derisively known as “Oink Oink.” She can’t read people’s intentions any better than Nathan can read facial expressions, but she longs for love, and that makes her vulnerable when young men seem interested in her. After all, “people are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go.”
Read this little yellow book and you’ll have a fun introduction to not only “The Bone Clocks,” but Mr. Mitchell’s other work. You’ll also have a wonderful tale to beguile you on the last Saturday in October as you sit inside, near the entrance to your house, waiting for the goblins and wizards of the land who make their way to your staircase, your suddenly scrutable door.
Susan Balée has reviewed David Mitchell’s last four novels for national publications.
First Published: October 25, 2015, 4:00 a.m.