 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book in a genre you normally avoid.
Slade House, by David Mitchell. I'm a wimp when it comes to horror, but I've always liked David Mitchell's science fiction and uncategorizable books, so Slade House sat on my shelf for a long time. The plot is simpler than his longer books, but follows the pattern of having several shorter narratives, spread over different eras, that fit together. Slade House is a haunted house, but the creatures inhabiting it aren't ghosts. They're a sister and brother trying to achieve immortality, which requires devouring a soul from a specially-chosen victim every nine years. Most of the sections are from the victims' point of view, which gives maximum creepiness, but also requires a lot of exposition in dialogue in order to be understandable, so we get a lot of the villains bickering, and one outright villain monologue. The book includes Dr. Marinus, a recurring character from all of Mitchell's books, and there's one character whose brother was a character in Mitchell's earlier book The Bone Clocks. Just as the sections of Slade House fit together into a narrative, each book works as a stand-alone but also fits into what Mitchell calls his "meta-novel."
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