What do you do when you're visiting someone's house and their garden starts vanishing? The blankness is moving forward like a storm front. Then, at the far end of the brambly side path, Jonah appears, and I relax for a second because he'll know what to do, but as I watch, the running-boy shape gets fuzzier and becomes a growling darkness with darker eyes, eyes that know me, and fangs that'll finish what they started and it's pounding after me in sickening slow motion, big as a cantering horse and I'd scream if I could but I can't my chest's full of molten panic and it's choking me choking it's wolves it's winter it's bones it's cartilage skin liver lungs it's Hunger it's Hunger it's Hunger and Run! I run towards the steps of Slade House my feet slipping on the pebbles like in dreams but if I fall it'll have me, and I've only got moments left and I stumble up the steps and grip the doorknob turn please turn it's stuck no no no it's scratched gold it's stiff it's ridged does not turn yes no yes no twist pull twist pull turn twist I'm falling forwards onto a scratchy doormat on black and white tiles and my shriek's like a shriek shrieked into a cardboard box all stifled and muted –What do you do when you finally get your hands on the latest book by one of your favourite authors and read frown puzzle frown turn the page and there and there you've read this before, the opening was a Twitter experiment and you followed it a year ago, so it's not really new, and if it's been expanded to book length, it's not really an experiment, and as this short work takes only a few hours to read, you wonder what others think of it; the others who might not have read all the other books by one of your favourite authors; the others who might not recognise the recurring characters and allusions to your favourite author's bigger narrative of which, in the end, this is simply another small part?
Would those other readers find this an interesting stand-alone read? Or would those other readers think it scant and balk at the late occurring infodump that ties Slade House to the bigger narrative, and most especially, to the Horologists (and by extension, the ongoing war against the Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass) of The Bone Clocks? What do you do when one of your favourite authors just might have tied his hands creatively bound tight there the silken cords that hinder hinder stop up the juices when every last story must fit the larger narrative?
What do I do? I read the latest book by one of my favourite authors, note the familiar (the Marinus, the Pehaligon, the Desiccated Embryos) and hope to remember the banjax and the orison and the candlestick from Nineveh so as to one day fit it all together. Would I recommend it? If David Mitchell is not one of your favourite authors, Slade House might feel incomplete, but it is, after all, a piece of the larger puzzle – do you like pieces? – and how big a piece remains to be seen.
