![]() ![]() On a micro level, this can make for malevolent fun. One group consists of soul vampires humans must die for them to live. On a macro level, “Slade House” plunges us again into a battle between two blocs of immortals. It first came to life as a short story, “The Right Sort,” which the author published in 140-character snippets on Twitter. Mitchell’s slim new novel, “Slade House,” is a sequel of sorts to “The Bone Clocks,” although it’s closer to being a sly footnote. ![]() Mitchell’s intertextual gamesmanship - the recurring characters and so on - began to seem, as a friend said to me, “less like Yoknapatawpha and more like Marvel.” This was a pastiche of second-rate fantasy fiction that actually read, quite often, like second-rate fantasy fiction. His gifts were put in service of a plot - there were psychic powers, creepy villains, an epic showdown between good and evil - that felt soft and formulaic. His most recent novel, “ The Bone Clocks” (2014), was nearly as ambitious but felt like a misfire. Intellect, feeling, narrative brawn - his kit bag opened and both the Johnstown flood and a rescue skiff poured out. It seemed, in that novel, that there was nothing this writer could not do. Mitchell’s best-known and most ambitious novel is “ Cloud Atlas” (2004), a suite of interfolded novellas that skip purposefully between eras and temperaments. ![]() Characters recur from one of his books to the next. David Mitchell’s novels are flecked with meaningful coincidences, to borrow Carl Jung’s description of synchronicity. ![]()
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