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.

Praise for Slade House

“Devilishly fun.”—The Washington Post

“Entertainingly eerie . . . Slade House boils down to Mitchell’s take on the classic ghost story, complete with his version of a haunted house. . . . The last thing we expected from Mitchell is simplicity, but here it is, burnished to a hellish bronze.”—Chicago Tribune

“A ripping yarn . . . Like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House or the Overlook Hotel from Stephen King’sThe 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.)

“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.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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

“Diabolically entertaining . . . dark, thrilling, and fun . . . a thoroughly entertaining ride full of mind games, unexpected twists, and even a few laughs.”—The Daily Beast

“Plants died, milk curdled, and my children went slightly feral as I succumbed to the creepy magic of David Mitchell’s Slade House. It’s a wildly inventive, chilling, and—for all its otherworldliness—wonderfully human haunted house story. I plan to return to its clutches quite often.”—Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl and The Grownup 

“I gulped down this novel in a single evening. Painstakingly imagined and crackling with narrative velocity, it’s aDracula for the new millennium, a Hansel and Gretel for grownups, a reminder of how much fun fiction can be.”—Anthony Doerr, author ofAll the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“David Mitchell doesn’t break rules so much as he proves them to be inhibitors to lively intelligent fiction.”—#1New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz


From the Hardcover edition.

David Mitchell is the award-winning and bestselling author of Slade House, The Bone Clocks, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream,and Ghostwritten. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mitchell was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world byTime in 2007. With KA Yoshida, Mitchell translated from the Japanese the internationally bestselling memoirThe Reason I Jump. He lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.


From the Hardcover edition.