Slade House

Slade House is a 2015 horror novel by David Mitchell. It's a type of soul vampire story. This was quick to read, and I'm wondering if there'll be a sequel. This isn't a scary tale but is interesting, both in how it's structured and in the characters involved.

from the back of the book:

Keep your eyes peeled for a small, black, iron door. Down the road from a working-class pub, along a narrow brick alley, you just might find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Later, you'll find that you can't. Every nine years, the residents of Slade House extend an invitation to someone who's different or lonely; a precocious teenager, a recently-divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside? For those who find out, it's already too late....

favorite quote:

Places change you.

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The Washington Post explains how the book came to be written:

The genesis of Norah and Jonah’s lair is weird but not much weirder than the genesis of “Slade House” itself. Last summer, Mitchell published the first chapter as a series of hundreds of tweets. Ordinarily, I would rather have my soul sucked from a hole in my skull than read a novel that started on Twitter, but this breezy string of murders is a fiendish delight.

The Guardian says it's "like Stephen King in a fever". The New York Times says, "The biggest drawback of “Slade House” might that it simply isn’t very scary." NPR says, "The less you know about that going in the better, because all the joy in Slade House is in the discovery." The LA Review of Books says, "Like most of his novels Slade House is a page-turner, fast paced, hard to put down."