Slade House by David Mitchell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
David Mitchell maintains a high literary quality while incorporating elements of fantasy. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Bone Clocks and this are his most fantastical novels. But all the novels take place in the same world. There’s even a way to see how Cloud Atlas is the same world. Although Bone Clocks is the real axle that holds them all together.
It’s hard to write a novel that would be worthwhile without any fantasy, and also include fantasy in it.
Psychic vampires; an illusory house; victim portraits on the walls. Ghosts, barely echoes, plotting their vengeance.
Any chapter would be a totally legitimate spooky short story on its own. The serial murders, nine years apart, give Mitchell the chance to flex his ability to weave many separate stories, each told in a different style, into a coherent whole. If you don’t like repetition, it’s not going to work for you. But for me, the repetition is like getting to live the same ghost story over and over without getting bored.