Fear is the X-factor

Rachna Singh

David Mitchell’s Halloween offering Slade House comes with high expectations. And why not? After all Mitchell has been short-listed and long-listed for the Booker prize on several occasions. His book Cloud Atlas has been made into a film and recently he won the Best Fantasy Book award for his book The Bone Clocks.

So the question that begs an answer is — does Slade House meet these expectations. The answer is an ambivalent yes and no. With its typical jargon of ‘atemporals, ‘soul harvesting’ and ‘horologists’, some would dub Slade House as nothing more than a haunted house yarn or at best a riveting vampire story by a master storyteller. To some extent they would be right. While The Bone Clocks was more rooted in realism with quick peeks into a supernatural world, Slade House gives up all pretence at realism and unabashedly flaunts its paranormal bearings.

Norah and Jonah Grayer are two soul-thirsty beings (call them what you will — ghosts or vampires or atemporals) who every nine years on the last Saturday of October indulge in a macabre feast. They lure their ‘engifted’ victims into ‘Slade House’, which is nothing but a hallucinatory dreamscape called an ‘orison’, feed them on banjax (which loosens the threads of the soul to the body) and then partake of the souls to attain immortality.

The story begins in 1979 with the first victim — a psychic valium popping, 13-year-old Nathan. Then comes Edmonds, the cop who is seduced by the wiles of Norah, anchored in the body of Lady Chetwynd in 1988. The cycle repeats itself with Sally Timms, a first-year graduate student in 1997 and then her lesbian journalist sister Freya in 2006. 2015 sees Marinus being reeled in. She is a psychiatrist in real life but is actually a horologist who fights the evil soul harvesters of ‘the shaded way’ and puts an end to their twisted desire for immortality. Although Jonah’s soul ends its journey, clever Norah finds her way into a well-formed foetus and begins anew her journey back to the world of the ‘living’. Seems like just another popular supernatural yarn.

Yet, we would most certainly be doing a disservice to Mitchell by categorising Slade House as just a ghost story. The book is much more than a creepy Elm Street tale. What sets Slade House apart is the masterly crafted tale by a prodigiously talented Mitchell. With consummate ease, Mitchell lures the reader into the mind of the victim.

Trussed up by this word wizard, the reader willy-nilly becomes a part of the paranormal goings-on. Characters are fleshed out with subtle nuances of speech, physical details and insight into their thought processes so much so that their grotesque end evokes sympathy. The predators are also more than some twisted paranormal psychopaths. The death of their parents when they are mere mortals and their introduction to occult is skilfully woven into the story through Fred Pink’s narrative.

Structurally, the book is made up of five distinct narratives separated in time. These narratives are woven into one common paranormal predator-victim theme. The ending smacks of ‘formula’ with its battle between good and evil but I would take that with a pinch of salt. Our traditional mythology is full of stories about the war between devas and asuras for the nectar of immortality. It is a fantasy world all the way with its caveat of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’.

Literary critics may not be happy with this fantasy-driven paranormal tale but today’s generation fed on Manga and Potter would certainly enjoy it. I’m not complaining either. I’m not a ghost-story fan and yet I was unable to put the book down till I had reached the end, thanks to a master storyteller.