Recurring Nightmares

I’ve never been a fan of scary movies or haunted houses. I’ve seen the The Shining. Once.  I tried watching it again a few years ago and didn’t make it through the opening credits. I’ve read some Steven King novels but they haven’t been as scary as books I’ve read about kidnapped children or this book by Anna Quindlen.

So it was with some trepidation that I chose a book for the horror category of the reading challenge I am working on. However when I saw David Mitchell’s Slade House under “Read a horror book” on this handy list from the NYPL, I realized I had found the perfect choice.

Slade House opens in 1979 in a voice reminiscent of characters from Mitchell's Black Swan Green. (This isn’t so bad, I thought.) Nathan and his mother have been invited by Lady Norah Grayer for an afternoon of music at her city residence Slade House. After some trouble finding the address, they step through an iron gate into a beautiful garden. Lady Norah’s brother Jonah befriends Nathan and they begin a game of chase around the house. After being frightened by a dog, Nathan runs inside and finds himself face-to-face of a portrait…of himself hanging on the wall. Nathan wakes up and finds himself with his father in Rhodesia. Has the previous scene been a dream? Or is this his dream now?

Mitchell keeps us guessing until the next section opens in 1988 when another unsuspecting guest of Slade House finds himself dreaming awake and sees his portrait on the stairs. Nine years later a group of college students in a paranormal society seek out the house hoping to find the guests who have disappeared in years past. They too meet their end at the hands of the crafty twins.

There is some comfort in the repetition. Upon meeting each new narrator, the reader expects he or she also will meet his or her demise. The suspense builds because we secretly hope they will escape or find a way to defeat these horrid twins who feed off human souls.  (I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t read the soul-feeding sections too closely.)

Breathing a sigh of relief, we find the next narrator, the sister of one of the students, not at Slade House but a local pub. She is meeting an informant who tells her the life histories of the Grayer twins. However, when she begins reading her texts from an increasingly frantic girlfriend, we realize the twins have simply projected a facsimile of the pub to lure her in. In the final section, a psychiatrist arrives on the scene hoping to be led through to the twins’ orison by an “astronaut.” In true Mitchell fashion, we get an action-packed final scene in which the twins’ weakened power is overrun by a time-traveling avenger.   

All in all, although there were a few hair-prickling scenes, I haven’t had nightmares and have had no trouble falling asleep. Though if someone invites me over for afternoon tea, I will be more than a little wary.