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scottdpomfret

Seanachie: A Boston Irish Storyteller and Part-Time Shaman

Books about place, magic, Faeries, Ireland, sex, God, and love

Currently reading

New Orleans as It Was
Charles "Pie" Dufour, Henry C. Castellanos
New Orleans after the Civil War
Justin A. Nystrom
Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (complete: First & Second Series)
Isabella Augusta Persse (Lady Gregory)
Bright Dead Things: Poems
Ada Limon
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
Mark Manson
Desire: Poems
Frank Bidart
Selected Poems 1976-2012
Jorie Graham
An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry
Wes Davis (Editor)
I Am An Executioner: Love Stories
Rajesh Parameswaran
An Artist of the Floating World
Kazuo Ishiguro

Slade House: A Novel

Slade House: A Novel - David Mitchell From the author of “Cloud Atlas” comes short, this highly imaginative and unconventional ghost story. Spanning approximately 36 years and five narrators (a miniature for this gifted writer), Slade House tells the story of a haunted house, the entrance to which appears only every five years on the last Saturday in October. The two living residents of the house lure in innocents to feast on their souls. Those lured in become paintings on the house’s walls. The novel traces five of these luring episodes during which the ghosts (for lack of a better word) of those lured in become progressively stronger and disrupt the residents’ soul feasting.

Mitchell’s particular talent is telling the same story essentially five times and having it each time be made new by the powerful voices of the separate narrators. That most narrators are the victims leaves him with the challenge of exposition, so we can better understand our villains. Occasionally, exposition becomes clunky (this is a fault not uncommon in Mitchell’s work, which is so imaginatively complex that much exposition is needed), but Mitchell rescues it in the end because his clunky exposition actually becomes part of the plot.

Highly recommended.