But in Slade House it nonetheless feels fresh, like seeing the theme from a recurring dream reinterpreted in someone else’s work of art. Danielewski’s cryptic House of Leaves thrown in. It’s a fairly common fantasy trope-one part Tamson House from Charles de Lint’s Moonheart, another part Room of Requirement from Harry Potter, with a little menacing from the Mark Z.
The house can only be reached through a small iron door in the unnervingly narrow and grim Slade Alley, but once you’re through the wall, the cramped space unfurls into a charming garden and an elegant manor. The eponymous haunted house is itself a masterpiece of fantasy architecture, a mansion and grounds cupped inside a city block technically too small to contain them. The 280-tweet story, with some tweaks, became the opening of a slim 238-page book.
Although Mitchell’s British publisher said the author was not planning to have a new book for a few years, “The Right Sort” waylaid him: “Accustomed to having his next few novels thoroughly mapped out, David Mitchell was not expecting to be ambushed by this one, but it proved irresistible,” a spokesperson for the publisher told the Guardian last year. In April of 2014, Mitchell created a new personal account, in order to spin the 280-tweet short story, “ The Right Sort.” In the story, a teenage boy named Nathan Bland accompanies his mother to a mysterious house in Slade Alley, the home of Lady Briggs, and has a frightening hallucination that he attributes to a valium he stole before the outing. It’s not surprising, then, that Mitchell’s newest novel, Slade House, began life as a series of tweets. Mitchell has a proven fondness for interpenetrating planes of narrative, crosshatchings of history, fiction, and speculation that hint at deeper truth, and Twitter lets you experiment with these simultaneities, or at least watch them play themselves out. Twitter seems like the kind of place a novelist like David Mitchell would feel at home it’s a platform that allows for shifting identities, where new accounts appear in unexpected contexts, only to slip away and return with a different name and face.
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