Ingenious . . . a deliciously creepy story to be read for plot and for pleasure, with your heart racing, and your eyes involuntarily skipping forwards to find out what happens
Sunday Times
Packed with heady ideas and pulsing with dark energy . . . both dazzlingly inventive and compulsively readable
Financial Times
An elegant fright-fest of the highest order . . . Mitchell masterfully, humorously, combines the classic components of a scary story - old house, dark alley, missing persons - with a realism, when describing the lives of the victims, that is pacy, funny and true
The Times
A clever and deep-frozenly chilling Gothic horror story . . . genuinely good, genuinely scary
Daily Mail
Mitchell seamlessly brings together his clashing parallel realities through wordplay so dazzling it seems to defy its own gravitational rules
Metro
Chilling and dazzling . . . but the real skill of the book is in its emotional impact. Mitchell makes you care about each of the narrators
Scotland on Sunday
Irresistible
Mail on Sunday
Mitchell's most pleasurable book to date, which also features some of his finest writing . . . a quiet, delightful triumph
Literary Review
Plants died, milk curdled, and my children went slightly feral as I succumbed to the creepy magic of David Mitchell's Slade House. It's a wildly inventive, chilling, and - for all its other-worldiness - wonderfully human haunted house story. I plan to return to its clutches quite often
Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl A fiendish delight . . . Mitchell is something of a magician
Washington Post
One of the most enjoyably, deliriously frightening novels I've read in ages . . . gleeful, skin-crawling brilliance
Observer
His work manages to beguile, impress and delight in equal parts . . . highly effective, creepy and witty
Irish Times
It's a gripping premise which becomes increasingly suspenseful as the stories move closer to the present day . . . Be warned, this is not a book to read before bedtime
Independent on Sunday
Manically ingenious . . . Vending-machine horror tropes, believable characters, wild farce, existential jeopardy, meta-fictional jokes: into the cauldron they go. Mitchell is at home in this kitchen
Guardian
A marvellously horrific, sharp and concise masterpiece . . . The novel's brevity should not lead the reader to underestimate just how much punch Mitchell's prose packs. His fiction is intoxicating
Lady
I gulped down this novel in a single evening. Intricately connected to David Mitchell's previous books, this compact fantasy burns with classic Mitchellian energy. Painstakingly imagined and crackling with narrative velocity, it's a Dracula for the new millennium, a Hansel and Gretel for grownups, a reminder of how much fun fiction can be
Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See Crackling with menace, yet a delightful sly wit
Sunday Mirror
A deliciously creepy, page-turning mystery . . . Mitchell's gift for characterisation shines through, making everyone vivid
SFX
Mitchell flits among the realest of voices - a shy teenage girl, a washed-up cop - in the most supernatural of settings: a brilliant, career-long high-wire act. If you haven't read him yet, Slade House is your 238-page, pocket-size gateway drug
Time
Brilliantly done, spooky, tense and beautifully written, full of the writerly flourishes that Mitchell is rightly famous for
Daily Express
A ripping yarn . . . Like Shirley Jackson's Hill House or the Overlook Hotel from Stephen King's The Shining, [Slade House] is a thin sliver of hell designed to entrap the unwary . . . As the Mitchellverse grows ever more expansive and connected, this short but powerful novel hints at still more marvels to come
San Francisco Chronicle
The joy in Slade House is in the discovery. It's in seeing different people make the same mistakes over and over again . . . It's in thinking that you'd be smarter, of course. That you'd see through all this B-movie schlock (like creepy portraits, sad ghosts and stairways that go nowhere), find the secret door, and escape. Only to find that you're already trapped
NPR