Portrayal of the weird domain of David Mitchell’s Slade house

Abstract EN

David Mitchell’s Slade House (2015) transcends the tropes of Gothic fiction.

The novel is structured as tales of paranormal occurrences experienced by five individual characters at the titular mansion.

The events recur every nine years between 1979 and 2015.

Mitchell uses gothic tropes like the haunted house, apparitions, occult rituals, hallucinations, mental degradation, and nightmarish dream sequences.

Yet, on a deeper level Slade House is a narrative tackling the domain of the ‘Weird’ where human capacity to comprehend reality is questioned.

Mark Fisher has called the Weird as something which generates a sensation of ‘wrongness’ in us.

The wrongness or the certainty that the things we perceive should not exist in our plain of reality generates the experience of the Weird.

This sense of wrongness, Fisher argues, is rooted in our inadequacy to comprehend all of reality.

Weird fiction has its roots in the works of H.

P.

Lovecraft.

His works dealt with articulating existential dread as an outcome of realizing our absolute insignificance in an indifferent cosmos.

Slade House grapples with the problem of articulating this sense of the Weird.

For this purpose it employs stylistic and thematic subversions of traditional Gothic and supernatural elements.

This paper will examine how David Mitchell’s Slade House goes beyond the Gothic and evolves into a work of weird fiction.

The paper will also probe into the novel’s portrayal of the inexplicable and the monstrous lurking in the realm of the Weird.