If I’d known beforehand that Slade House is a kind of companion to The Bone Clocks (which I haven’t read—James Wood’s New Yorker piece about it made me unsure if I wanted to), I’m not sure I would have picked it up. But I think it works as a standalone piece, and, I don’t know, maybe I’m more curious about The Bone Clocks now?
Slade House is divided into five sections, each of which is set nine years after the previous one, and the first of which is set in 1979. In that first section, we meet 13-year-old Nathan Bishop and his mother, Rita, as they make their way to Slade Alley, looking for Slade House, where Rita is meant to be playing the piano at an afternoon “musical gathering” to which she’s been invited by Norah Grayer, the rich lady of the house. Nathan’s a bit buzzed from the Valium he’s snuck from his mother’s supply, so when things get weird after they arrive, he assumes it’s the pills. But no, it’s Slade House. It’s hard to say more than that without being spoiler-y, but each section of the book is a story like Nathan’s, of someone going to Slade House—though each section has some key differences.
When this book isn’t busy being pleasingly creepy, it’s often pleasingly funny, like in this passage, when Nathan’s thinking about Godzilla (which he catches a glimpse of on someone’s television, in a window he passes) as he and his mom are hurrying to try to find Slade Alley:
Now Godzilla’s picked up a train, which makes no sense because amphibians don’t have thumbs. Maybe Godzilla’s thumb is like a panda’s so-called thumb, which is really an evolved claw. Maybe—
“Nathan!” Mum’s got my wrist. What did I say about dawdling?”
I check back. “‘Chop-chop!’; ‘Don’t dawdle.’”
“So what are you doing now?”
“Thinking about Godzilla’s thumbs.”
(pp 5-6)
Elsewhere, one character refers to another as a “dim corgi who fancies himself a wolf” (228). Ha/ouch!
There are also some pleasing descriptive passages, like this:
The streetlights are coming on. The sun sinks into tarmac-gray clouds, over one-way mazes of brick houses, gasworks, muddy canals, old factories, unloved blocks of flats from the sixties, multistory car parks from the seventies, tatty-looking housing from the eighties, a neon-edged multiplex from the nineties. Cul-de-sacs, ring roads, bus lanes, flyovers. (p 146)
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