Slade House

Published in 2015, Slade House is a literary fantasy horror novel by British author David Mitchell. The book is a companion piece to Mitchell’s previous novel, The Bone Clocks (2014), which features an invisible war between immortal beings known generally as Atemporals. Mitchell wrote the first chapter of Slade House as a writing experiment on Twitter, limiting himself to the social media platform’s 140-character limit to render the protagonist’s thoughts. The novel, which spans around 40 years, tells the story of several visitors who are drawn to the titular house, which is inhabited by the sinister Grayer twins, who use their psychic abilities to entrap their guests’ souls. Mitchell uses this story to explore The Corruptive Power of Wealth, Recognizing the Beauty of the Human Soul, and The Importance of Living for Others.

This guide is based on the hardcover first edition of the novel, published by Random House in 2015.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide feature depictions of death, child death, animal death, death by suicide, racism, sexism, graphic violence, emotional abuse, substance use, illness, physical abuse, sexual content, mental illness, bullying, and cursing.

Plot Summary

The novel begins in 1979, when musician Rita Bishop and her son, Nathan, arrive at Westwood Road to attend a soirée at Lady Norah Grayer’s residence. Despite initial difficulties in locating the elusive alleyway entrance to the Grayer home, called Slade House, Rita and Nathan eventually find themselves in a manor estate with a lush garden. 

Rita is brought inside the house while Nathan is entertained by Jonah, a boy whom Rita identifies as Lady Grayer’s son. When he invites Nathan to play a game, Jonah transforms into a monstrous bull mastiff, which horrifies Nathan. Nathan runs into the house and is told by Lady Grayer to meet his mother upstairs. Entering the upstairs room, Nathan finds himself in his father’s house in Rhodesia, where he realizes that his visit to Slade House was all a dream. Nathan’s father encourages him to drink coffee, after which Nathan finds himself back in Slade House. There, Jonah and Norah reveal themselves to be twins who disguised themselves to trick Rita and Nathan into believing that the soirée was real. The Grayers’ true intention is to lure Nathan into their attic, where they perform a magical ritual to extract and consume his soul.

The novel moves ahead nine years, to 1988. Detective Inspector Gordon Edmonds is sent to examine Slade Alley after a coma patient named Fred Pink wakes up and claims to have a lead on the missing Bishops case. Gordon, a lonely but gruff divorcee, makes the acquaintance of Slade House resident Chloe Chetwynd, herself a lonely widow whose helplessness Gordon exploits into a budding relationship. 

The more he visits Chloe, the more Gordon becomes aware that Slade House is haunted by three ghosts. Chloe identifies them as two children, Norah and Jonah, and one more ghost she calls Eeyore. Gordon is suspicious that one of the ghosts shares a name with the woman Rita Bishop was supposedly visiting, but he dismisses it to enjoy a day of food and sex with Chloe. 

Later that night, Gordon wakes up in Chloe’s bed, and she beckons him upstairs to join her in the bath. Instead, Gordon finds a prison cell containing Rita Bishop, who claims to have been “the Monster’s” prisoner for nearly a decade. Just as he liberates Rita, Gordon finds himself in the same trap that Nathan was in nine years earlier. The twins Norah and Jonah Grayer reveal themselves and their plan to feed on Gordon’s soul in order to recharge the room in which their birth-bodies exist, frozen out of time. Norah complains that their methods are getting sloppy, but Jonah refuses to listen to her warning.

The novel jumps forward nine years again, to 1997. A university Paranormal Society decides to investigate the mysterious Slade Alley Vanishings of Rita and Nathan Bishop, and Gordon Edmonds. They determine that the door to Slade House only appears every nine years, a theory they intend to prove with their attempt to visit. 

Among their group is Sal Timms, a girl with low self-esteem who has a crush on another society member named Todd Cosgrove. The society passes through the Slade House gate, only to find that Slade House is not a haunted house but a residence for foreign students, and a Halloween party is in full swing. Sal spends time with Todd at the party, but when he goes to use the bathroom, she accidentally eats drugged brownies and experiences several strange occurrences that signal that the house is not what it appears to be. 

At one point, a man in a dressing gown gives Sal a hairpin and promptly disappears. Later, she watches a news report in which she is reported missing, five days having apparently passed since she entered Slade House. Sal eventually reunites with Todd, who explains that the Grayers are trying to entrap Sal because she has an Engifted soul. They plan a daring escape from the house, but Sal ends up in the same attic where the Grayer twins consumed the souls of their past victims. Once again, Norah warns Jonah that their failure to improve their methods will eventually lead to their downfall. Jonah disregards her as he commences the ritual to consume Sal’s soul.

Nine years later, in 2006, Sal’s older sister, Freya, goes to the Fox and Hounds, a pub on Westwood Road, to interview Fred Pink about her sister’s disappearance. Fred tells a long-winded story that exposes the Grayer twins’ origins, beginning over 100 years ago in Norfolk. After demonstrating their telepathic ability to communicate with each other to the lord and lady of the estate where they lived, Jonah and Norah Grayer were taken away by a doctor named Léon Cantillon, who brought them to Algiers to learn from a mystical figure called the Albino Sayyid of Aït Arif. 

There, the Grayers honed their abilities and set off with Cantillon for the United States, where they made a living profiting off the spiritualist movement. Cantillon and the Grayers traveled the world, eventually arriving back in England. When Cantillon unveils his plans to use the twins to establish a new field of study called psychoesoterica, the twins use their powers to stage his apparent death by suicide. 

They then secure Slade House as their operational base, which will ensure their joint immunity from death. Slade House relies on the twins’ ability to feed Engifted souls a special compound called banjax and lure them to the lacuna, the room where the Grayers’ birth-bodies remain preserved. To achieve both prerequisites to their ritual, the Grayers construct a detailed simulation that appeals to their Engifted guests and convinces them to reach the lacuna. 

Fred ends his story by theorizing that both Sal and Freya have Engifted souls. This doesn’t convince Freya, who prepares to leave, only to discover that she has been trapped in Slade House the entire time. Jonah, posing as Fred Pink, reveals himself and Norah. Norah scolds Jonah for telling their life’s story to someone, since secrecy has enabled their operation to continue undisturbed for many years. 

Just as they are about to perform the ritual to consume Freya’s soul, the last remnant of Sal’s ghost intervenes, carrying Rita Bishop’s hairpin, which she received from Gordon Edmonds at the Halloween party. Sal uses the hairpin to stab Jonah and interrupt the ceremony. This allows Freya’s soul to die unconsumed.

In 2015, Slade House is severely weakened, and the Grayer twins have only one final opportunity to restore the lacuna before it collapses forever. Norah takes it upon herself to lure an Engifted woman named Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby to Slade House to achieve this objective. She poses as a man named Bombadil, an explorer of reality bubbles like Slade House, and offers Marinus information that might indulge her interest in Fred Pink’s story. Marinus is impressed by the scale and detail of the illusion behind Slade House, which allows Norah to lead her closer to the lacuna. The doctor declines every opportunity to consume banjax, however, forcing Norah and Jonah to construct a secondary illusion, set in a hospital room.

In the hospital illusion, Norah and Jonah pose as doctors, hoping to convince Marinus that she was in a road accident and needs to take medication. She refuses the medication, indicating that she is aware of the Grayer twins’ true nature. It is revealed that the doctor is a Horologist, an Atemporal operative dedicated to policing Atemporals who prey on ordinary human beings. 

Jonah attempts to destroy her and is quickly killed by her parry. Just as the doctor and Norah are about to duel, Marinus sets off an explosive that renders the lacuna vulnerable to entropy. This causes Norah to rapidly age and die, putting an end to the Grayer twins’ operation at Slade House. The novel ends with Norah refusing to let her soul die. Her soul floats until it finds a pregnant woman. She possesses the growing fetus with the intention of taking revenge on Marinus when she is reborn.