Slade House

A Novel

By: David Mitchell

Narrated by: Thomas Judd, Tania Rodrigues

The New York Times bestseller by the author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Named One of the Best Books of the Year by San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, National Post, BookPage, and Kirkus Reviews

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.

Praise for Slade House

“A fiendish delight . . . Mitchell is something of a magician.”—The Washington Post

“Entertainingly eerie . . . We turn to [Mitchell] for brain-tickling puzzle palaces, for character studies and for language.”—Chicago Tribune

“A ripping yarn . . . Like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House or the Overlook Hotel from Stephen King’s The Shining, [Slade House] is a thin sliver of hell designed to entrap the unwary. . . . As the Mitchellverse grows ever more expansive and connected, this short but powerful novel hints at still more marvels to come.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Like Stephen King in a fever . . . manically ingenious.”—The Guardian (U.K.)

“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.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Tightly crafted and suspenseful yet warmly human . . . the ultimate spooky nursery tale for adults.”—The Huffington Post

A wonderful bit of fantasy!

David Mitchell is constantly toying with the scientific and metaphysical in a way that delights the imagination. This work followed Cloud Atlas for me in my journey through the writings of Mitchell, and I do believe will propel me into Bone Clocks, which I've heard this is meant to accompany. Bravo, David Mitchell!

thoroughly entertaining

a new author to add to my favorites. it was a fun and dreamlike novel.

Competent but clunky

An enjoyable listen. Nicely creepy, but not exactly horror. Mitchell is first and foremost a master of voice and this book is more evidence of that. Each voice presented is distinct and engaging.

But while the book presents an interesting mystery in the opening of the novel, the resolution of that mystery is handed to the reader in a way that is unsatisfying. The book just sort of explains what’s going on, there’s no reveal or satisfying moment of epiphany when the curtain is pulled back.

So while I liked this book and am interested in reading more of the “Mitchellverse” I’m also a little reluctant to do so for fear that those books will also end in a sort of flat, uninteresting way.

Good story and captivating

Good creepy ghost story with unexpected twists and turns that lays itself out throughout the story in bits and pieces. Fun to listen to.

This is his worst book

What did you like best about Slade House? What did you like least?

I liked all his other books but this one was boring. It told the same story over & over again with a different victim/character each time. The basic premise was not very interesting.

Was Slade House worth the listening time?

no