I've mentioned before how this Books of Horror Go To List is the gift that keeps on giving because it's so incredibly diverse, ably highlighting just how varied the horror genre is nowadays. This is a horror novel to many and it's certainly got horror riddled throughout it, not to mention a dose of fantasy and science fiction, but it's also a nested mystery and could easily be labelled as a literary novel. It's a rare book that could conceivably compete for a Stoker and a Booker, but this is it. It's even more ridiculous to think about that when we realise that it began as a Twitter story and sits in David Mitchell's bibliography as a companion piece to a longer novel, 'The Bone Clocks'.

It's not a typically structured book for a horror novel either, unfolding in what could be considered five short stories that absolutely connect. They're all set in the same place, but nine years apart, progressing forward from 1979 to 2015, and there are occasional connections between them. This is all insanely ambitious, as you might imagine, but Mitchell makes it feel not merely natural but utterly effortless. This is clever and intricate construction, told in a variety of voices that evolve with the timeframe, made to feel like the work of a pantser, especially as we begin with an ADHD thirteen-year-old called Nathan Bishop.

Nathan lives with his single mother, because his dad moved to Rhodesia after their divorce. They are doing okay but mum is frankly leaping at an opportunity to elevate their status, now that she's been invited to Slade House to meet Lady Grayer. This is an entry into a new world for them in the sense of social standing, but it also seems to be an entry into a new world, period. They can't find the door to Slade House on their first walk through Slade Alley, off Westwood Rd, but there it is a moment later on a second attempt. A tiny door leads to a garden which starts to unravel. "What do you do when you're visiting someone's house and their garden starts vanishing?" he asks.

If it wasn't dreamlike at this point, it becomes thoroughly hallucinogenic. Nathan suddenly finds himself in his father's lodge in Rhodesia where he's eaten by a giant coffee mug. And then he's in Slade House again, where his mother is playing piano with Yehudi Menuhin. Lady Grayer and her young son have become siblings and Nathan's lungs don't work anymore. The twins suck his soul away and that's it for the Bishops. Is this horror? Sure, but it's clearly fantasy and science fiction, as well as straightforward drama. There are plenty of depths to explore in these characters, who may well only be here to introduce us to whoever or whatever these soul suckers are.

Fast-forward seven years and Gordon Edmonds, a divorced racist policeman is investigating their disappearance. He's in the right place, Slade Alley, off Westwood Rd, and he finds the same tiny door, but it takes him to a different house with different people. His story unfolds as a romance, an erotic one too, with a lady named Chloe Chetwynd. And fast-forward another seven and now a university paranormal society is investigating the disappearances of Edmonds and the Bishops. This was my favourite section of them all, not least because Mitchell has the sheer balls to deny an introduction to his new narrator for ten frickin' pages. The dude's playing with us.

That feeling only increases in the 2006 segment, which I'm not going to detail at all because we're well into spoiler territory at this point. Of course, each section is an escalation on the prior one, a progression that isn't just in impact but intricacy and to our own understanding of what's actually going on. Now, I fully expect that this will play very differently depending on whether we had read 'The Bone Clocks' before diving in. If I had, I feel pretty sure that I'd have known exactly what was going on from the outset but I hadn't, so I started to figure things out in 1997, then picked up the majority of it in 2006 and learned the rest in 2015.

The horror is in the sheer lack of control these characters have when faced with whatever's living in Slade House. Whether we know what they are and why they're doing what they're doing or not, they're clearly predators and they're so in control of everything that's going on that this could be considered playing with their food. The fantasy—and science fiction, because you don't get terms like "psychovoltaic pauperdom" in fantasy—is in how they do that and how, maybe, someone who has been selected as prey may not be quite what they seem.

I had an absolute blast with this. It's utterly unlike anything else in the Books of Horror Go To List and it's utterly unlike anything else I've read. Apparently, Mitchell is a major name, well beyond any suggestion of horror. I've heard of one of his other books, 'Cloud Atlas', because it was filmed by the heady directorial combination of the Wachowski sisters and Tom Tykwer of 'Run Lola Run' fame. I haven't seen it but should. It's apparently a metafictional novel told by multiple narrators and that's hardly an atypical approach for him. I also see that his entire body of work comprises a further larger work that he calls a macronovel. That seems like books to both enjoy and study.

Frankly, it's the sort of book that I wish I could read again for the first time. More than once. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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