The first book I wrote about when I started my TEDrake Book Blog
several years ago was David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,
a historical novel about a young Dutch merchant stationed in Nagasaki, Japan in
the early 1800’s, the only port open to foreign traders at the time. Based on that memory,
I recently picked up Mitchell’s Slade House, a book that turned out to be as far from what I was expecting as one could imagine, though by no means a disappointment.
While
Thousand Autumns is an epic, Slade House is a gothic novel, set in
England. It is also a page-turner. The only commonality between the two books is
that the writing is superb in both.
Slade House is a place, well more accurately was a place, in
the English countryside. Once every nine years, exactly, it can be
accessed through a small iron door in a brick wall along an alley. You visit Slade House by invitation, and then you are never seen again. That’s really about all I can say without
giving away the book.
Mitchell’s novel runs the spectrum of the Gothic genre. It has the House (consider the houses in the book-based
black and white horror film classics like The House of Seven Gables, or House
of Usher, or even Rose Cottage in Dark Shadows). It has the villagers, who know something is going on, but don’t know
what it is (think: Frankenstein or Dracula). Perhaps most important, it has empathy for the
“bad” guys, in this case a brother-sister duo wronged by the world and just
trying to make their way. If you’ve read and felt the angst of Anne Rice’s characters, you will recognize these two.
Recommendation: Great,
short (238 pages), read.
