This month we delve into the interlocked world of David Mitchell and his haunted house mystery, Slade House.
First, a little digression. Most people know the author David Mitchell from the Cloud Atlas book that became a movie with Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. Now that book was fine but I really liked Black Swan Green more and I grew to like The Bone Clocks and the Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet more as well.
It helps to know when reading from the Mitchell oeuvre that characters from one book might wash ashore in another and that souls don’t seem to be anchored down very tightly either.
Back to Slade House, until the end it is a horror/fantasy straight out of the X-Files. A sibling duo that needs to feed every nine years to power their lifestyle. Then they choose the wrong person at the end, a leading Bone Clocks character ends the story and ties it into the other books.
For beers, gotta go dark and British and well evil is connected to the color black so first up is Black House from Modern Times followed by Black Cab from Fuller’s a thoroughly English Porter.
Or in a nod to name dropping that Mitchell does so well, maybe a dark mild from Timothy Taylor since Jason Taylor from Black Swan Green shares a name with the brewer.