Slade House by David Mitchell review – gleeful, skin-crawling brilliance

Mitchell’s classic haunted house tale, which started life as a story on Twitter, finds him at his creepy best

There are good and bad things for me about reading (and reviewing) thrillers. Good, because I have an unquenchable thirst for being thoroughly frightened by fiction. Bad, because that fear has to be realised in an environment where I feel safe – other adults around, the scary bits wrapped up before bed, and so on. I read David Mitchell’s Slade House while surrounded by much of my extended family; I still found myself piling my children into my own bed at the end of the evening, ostensibly to keep them safe from Mitchell’s haunted house and soul-sucking vampires, but if I’m honest, it was really all about me.

Set in the universe of Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, where humans live unknowingly alongside immortals, it opens as a boy and his mother search along a narrow, high-walled alleyway in an anonymous town for the entrance to Slade House. It’s not there, and then a small black door appears, “black, nothing-black, like the gaps between stars”. On the other side is a stately old home that doesn’t quite fit into the shabby neighbourhood – or into the space in which it lies.

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