Slade House

“‘I have nightmares,’ says Jonah, ‘about running out of food.’

[…]

‘Food that makes you hungrier, the more of it you eat,’ says Jonah.”

In this passage, Jonah frames the absence of food as the subject of his nightmare but highlights the strange detail that the food will inevitably make him hungry for more food. His dream acts as a metaphor for his own insatiable hunger: The more he consumes Engifted souls to extend his lifespan, the more he craves his access to immortality. This underscores The Corrupting Power of Wealth as a theme because Jonah can never feel satisfied with what he already has.

“Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone ever writes ‘I woke up and it was all a dream’ at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it’s a cop-out, it’s the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream. It’s a shame Jonah’s not real, though.”

Mitchell deploys metafictional commentary in this passage to hint at the true nature of Nathan’s father’s house in Zimbabwe. By pointing to the unsatisfying cliché of the narrative being a dream all along, Mitchell implies that the more satisfying outcome would be Nathan’s discovery that Jonah and Slade House were real, despite the surreal and horrifying experiences he had there. This drives a tension between the unsatisfying reality of Nathan’s father’s house and the satisfying uncanniness that defines Slade House.