Mitchell’s characteristic is to play with fiction in order to ask questions about time, identity and temptation rather than give us a linear narrative. The climax gives us a showdown which surprises, satisfies and horrifies anew. Things “fall down the cracks”, however, and when the ghost of the policeman hands his successor a real knife, something starts to change. The diabolical cleverness of the predatory twins evokes a sense of dread as four out of five of the narrators are captured. This is, as the best kind of ghost story shows, much scarier than the actual physical assaults. One of the most chilling moments comes when Nathan sees a woman mouthing “‘No, No, No or ‘Go, Go, Go’” behind a window, a warning he ignores.

As in fairy-tales, those who eat or drink anything are doomed, yet just enough of the personality of previous victims remains to try to warn the next. Each time, the nastiness inches up, before the trap snaps shut. Each time, the reader hopes the victim will escape. The next victim is a policeman, whose sexual vanity, greed and materialism make him easy to dislike – but whose sense of humour and responsibility make him more than the easy prey which almost deserves his gruesome fate. Mitchell deploys his gift for creating convincingly realistic characters who rapidly command our interest and sympathy, but who turn out to be not always what they seem, and who, once again, have links to previous works. In the Twitter story the drug, which “breaks down the world into bite-sized sentences”, worked within the parameters of the form and provided an explanation for some terrifying visions. High on his Mum’s Valium, Nathan embarks on a game of Fox and Hounds with Jonah, a curiously old-fashioned boy the same age as himself. The first section, “The Right Sort”, began as a short story on Twitter in 2014, and is narrated by Nathan, a bullied boy accompanying his embarrassing mother to a gorgeous garden and house whose entrance, off a narrow, slummy alley, seems as mysterious and magical as that to Wonderland or Narnia. Once again, Mitchell plays with interlocking stories and times as if fiction were a Rubik’s Cube.

David Mitchell’s Slade House joins Guillermo del Toro’s film Crimson Peak and Peter James’s thriller The House on Cold Hill, being set in a mansion which, initially seductive, proves nightmarish. Home is where we ought to feel safest, so no surprise that there are several haunted houses in the mix this Halloween.

Slade house book