Just Finished Reading Slade House by David Mitchell

Slade House, a 2015 novel by David Mitchell which I just finished reading, is my third from this author, the first two being Cloud Atlas (which I was intrigued into reading from its movie promos) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet...you can read my past reviews of them by clicking on their titles. In Slade House I encounter once again the concept of "psychic vampire", which Stephen King wrote about in his novel Doctor Sleep and which one of the sci-fi Scanners movies also delved into.  It's always been interesting to me that, once the author has introduced paranormal or supernatural powers into his or her story, then it becomes necessary to impose special limiting rules on those powers...like, for example, the existence within the Superman series of kryptonite as a counter to his otherwise unlimited powers.  In Slade House, the "vampires" have to replenish their power at a specific place in London (hence the book's title) every nine years by drawing to them unsuspecting victims who they know possess the psychic component they must feed upon. This way the novel divides itself into essentially separate short stories, jumping from 1979 to 1988 to 1997 to 2006 and finally 2015...

The theme of reincarnation, which was evident in the earlier Cloud Atlas, is here as well in Slade House.  But then I discovered that this book has a predecessor, The Bone Clocks, which I should have read first since some of those "rules" I referred to were first laid out in it while one of its characters makes an important appearance at the end of Slade House.  It seems that David Mitchell is like other authors such as Isaac Asimov and Stephen King, creating his own fictional universe with recurring characters and paradigms that crop up from time to time within his supposedly "independent" novels...it would have been more accurate to describe them as all being a part of the same series. In 2006 Mitchell reportedly wrote a book, titled From Me Flows What You Call Time, that he has put off its release until the year 2114: I can hardly wait, let's see, I'll be turning 158 that year...

Slade House was a good story in the gothic horror tradition.  My only problem with it was that the author didn't make it a complete story in itself but tried to integrate it with his earlier works...I've read Stephen King's novels Hearts in Atlantis and Insomnia and had the same problem with these two works' tie-ins with his Dark Tower series: if you haven't read it then you're lost to some extent with these two books.  But David Mitchell's writing is what it is and I plan to read his other novels, including The Bone Clocks...