Shannon Turlington

A new recommended read: Slade House by David Mitchell. Every nine years on the last Saturday in October, a mysterious iron door appears in the wall of Slade Alley. If you open it–and you should hope you don’t–you’ll find yourself in an impossible garden looking at the back of Slade House, at a place where it absolutely cannot be. And if you venture further in, you’ll soon realize that Slade House is not at all what it seems.

This is a short book, structured like a set of Chinese nesting boxes. Each story, set nine years apart, repeats and builds on the previous one. Mitchell has made an agreeably creepy contribution to the haunted house genre with Slade House, which began as a story told in a series of tweets.