Ghost stories tap into something ancient and primal. Like most people, I have a cold, soft spot for them. The earliest story archived in my memory is not The Very Hungry Caterpillar but a yarn my brother shared with me about a young boy called David who dug up his recently deceased grandfather’s liver. Unwisely, David sold the liver to the local butcher in order to buy sweets. (No spoilers in case Hollywood comes knocking, but Gramps turns out to be not as dead and gone as David reckoned.)

Despite naming my first published novel Ghostwritten, I’d never considered writing a full-length “ghost novel” until handing in the manuscript of The Bone Clocks in 2014. Some juicy scenes remained from an earlier version, and I had the idea of turning this “spare rib” material into a ghost story for Twitter called The Right Sort. This I posted in clusters of tweets, timed to coincide with British commuter hours, over several weeks prior to publication of The Bone Clocks.

I like to think The Right Sort was well received: for sure, it was a lot of fun to do, but the narrative raised more questions than it answered, especially about the mysterious house and its owners. To explore these questions and concoct answers would require a short novel. My publishing cycle had settled to a comfy once every three or four years, but Slade House felt at least two-thirds pre-formed in my head, and the novelty of writing a book of less than 500 pages was tempting. I let it jump the queue.

As a visitor to the genre, I immersed myself in the canon: Edgar Allan Poe, MR James, Sheridan le Fanu; Henry James’s pitch-perfect The Turn of the Screw; and stories whose fame nowadays rivals or eclipses their authors’ (not too shoddy a fate, really); WW Jacobs’s The Monkey’s Paw; F Marion Crawford’s The Upper Berth; Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Neil Gaiman and Stephen King need no introduction, but I also came across the ever-inventive Joe Hill, and Shirley Jackson’s stunning The Haunting of Hill House. I reread Sarah Waters’s superb The Little Stranger, and shared a stage at the Hay festival with Tiffany Murray, whose Sugar Hall glints and glimmers.

Japan breeds special, twisted ghosts, so I explored the fiction of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Taichi Yamada, and took in some urban myths. My favourite is kuchi-sake onna, who conceals her murderous ear-to-ear shark-mouth behind a surgical mask often worn by Japanese people with a cold – the friend of a friend saw her, just the day before yesterday, outside your house.

The ghost story is a taxonomical thicket of sub-genres, often defined by what the ghost turns out to be. There’s the ghost-as-symptom-of-insanity sub-genre, as in The Yellow Wallpaper. Stories where ghosts are ghosts are subdivided further into ghosts who offer help, or who want solace, or justice, or blood, or vats of blood (see The Shining). One sub-genre refuses to reveal its genre: maybe the POV character is being visited by beings from beyond the grave, or maybe he or she is having the mother of all nervous breakdowns – we’ll never know for sure. Both The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House live here. There’s also the historical ghost story, dominated by backstory and only framed by the present; the “cloaked” ghost story, where the ghost passes unnoticed until the big reveal; and a meta-genre about ghost-hunters or writers of ghost stories. One beautiful, deranged example of the latter is William Gay’s slow-burning Little Sister Death.

Out of this ectoplasmic diversity, the five parts of Slade House grew. My aim was to turn the vice of repetition into the virtue of outfoxing the reader by using assumptions acquired previously. Every nine years, between 1979 and 2015, a “visitor” is steered at the end of October down Slade Alley to a small black iron door. Waiting for each visitor behind the door is a bespoke trap that they navigate and interpret in ways dictated by who they are.

Waiting for the reader is an alternate sub-genre of the ghost story. If you have time and inclination to drop into Slade House, I trust you’ll enjoy your visit. In an ancient, primal kind of way.

Extract

Slade Alley’s the narrowest alley I’ve ever seen. It slices between two houses, then vanishes left after 30 paces or so. I can imagine a tramp living there in a cardboard box, but not a lord and lady. ‘No doubt there’ll be a proper entrance on the far side,’ says Mum. ‘Slade House is only the Grayers’ town residence. Their proper home’s in Cambridgeshire.’ If I had 50p for every time Mum’s told me that, I’d now have £3.50. It’s cold and clammy in the alley like White Scar Cave in the Yorkshire Dales. Dad took me when I was 10. I find a dead cat lying on the ground at the first corner. It’s gray like dust on the moon. I know it’s dead because it’s as still as a dropped bag, and because big flies are drinking from its eyes. How did it die? There’s no bullet wound or fang marks, though its head’s at a slumped angle so maybe it was strangled by a cat­strangler. It goes straight into the Top Five of the Most Beautiful Things I’ve Ever Seen. Maybe there’s a tribe in Papua New Guinea who think the droning of flies is music. Maybe I’d fit in with them. ‘Come along, Nathan.’ Mum’s tugging my sleeve.

I ask, ‘Shouldn’t it have a funeral? Like Gran did?’ ‘No. Cats aren’t human beings. Come along.’ ‘Shouldn’t we tell its owner it won’t be coming home?’ ‘How? Pick it up and go along Westwood Road knocking on all the doors saying, “Excuse me, is this your cat?”’ Mum sometimes has good ideas. ‘It’d take a bit of time, but–’

‘Forget it, Nathan – ­we’re due at Lady Grayer’s right now.’

‘But if we don’t bury it, crows’ll peck out its eyes.’

‘We don’t have a spade or a garden round here.’

‘Lady Grayer should have a spade and a garden.’

Mum closes her eyes again. Maybe she’s got a headache. ‘This conversation is over.’ She pulls me away and we go down the middle section of Slade Alley. It’s about five houses long, I’d guess, but hemmed in by brick walls so high you can’t see anything. Just sky. ‘Keep your eyes peeled for a small black iron door,’ says Mum, ‘set into the right­hand wall.’ But we walk all the way to the next corner, and it’s 96 paces exactly, and thistles and dandelions grow out of cracks, but there’s no door. After the right turn we go another 20 paces until we’re out on the street parallel to Westwood Road. A sign says Cranbury Avenue. Parked opposite’s a St John ambulance.

Someone’s written “clean me” in the dirt above the back wheel. The driver’s got a broken nose and he’s speaking into a radio. A mod drives past on a scooter like off Quadro­phenia, riding without a helmet. ‘Riding without a helmet’s against the law,’ I say.

‘Makes no sense,’ says Mum, staring at the envelope.

‘Unless you’re a Sikh with a turban. Then the police’ll–’

‘“A small black iron door”: I mean … how did we miss it?’

I know. For me, Valium’s like Asterix’s magic potion, but it makes Mum dopey. She called me Frank yesterday – ­Dad’s name – and didn’t notice. She gets two prescriptions for Valium from two doctors because one’s not enough, but–­

–­a dog barks just inches away and I’ve shouted and jumped back in panic and peed myself a bit, but it’s OK, it’s OK, there’s a fence, and it’s only a small yappy dog, it’s not a bull mastiff, it’s not that bull mastiff, and it was only a bit of pee. Still, my heart’s hammering like mad and I feel like I might puke. Mum’s gone out into Cranbury Avenue to look for big gates to a big house, and hasn’t even noticed the yappy dog. A bald man in overalls walks up, carrying a bucket and a pair of stepladders over his shoulder. He’s whistling I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony).

Mum cuts in. ‘Excuse me, do you know Slade House?’ The whistling and the man stop. ‘Do I know What House?’ ‘Slade House. It’s Lady Norah Grayer’s residence.’

‘No idea, but if you find Her Ladyship, tell her I fancy a bit o’ posh if she fancies a bit o’ rough.’ He tells me: ‘Love the dickie bow, son,’ and turns into Slade Alley, picking up his whistling where he left off. Mum looks at his back, muttering: ‘Thanks a heap for bloody nothing.’

‘I thought we weren’t supposed to say “bloody”–’” ‘Don’t start, Nathan. Just –­ don’t.’ I think that’s Mum’s angry face. ‘OK.’ ‘We’ll backtrack,’ Mum decides. ‘Maybe Lady Grayer meant the next alley along.’ She goes back into Slade Alley and I follow. We reach the middle section in time to see the stepladder man vanish around the corner of the far end, where the moon-­gray cat’s still lying dead. ‘If someone killed you down here,’ I remark, ‘nobody’d see’. Mum ignores me. Maybe it wasn’t very Normal. We’re halfway down the middle bit when Mum stops: ‘I’ll be jiggered!’ There’s a small black iron door, set into the brick wall. It’s small all right. I’m four feet eleven inches, and it’s only up to my eyes. A fat person’d need to squeeze hard to get through. It has no handle, keyhole, or gaps around the edges. It’s black, nothing-­black, like the gaps between stars. ‘How on earth did we miss that?’ says Mum. ‘Some Boy Scout you are.’

‘I’m not in the Scouts any more,’ I remind her. Mr Moody our scoutmaster told me to get lost, so I did, and it took the Snowdonia mountain rescue service two days to find my shelter. I’d been on the local news and everything. Everyone was angry, but I was only following orders. Mum pushes the door, but it stays shut. ‘How on earth does the bally thing open? Perhaps we ought to knock.’ The door pulls my palm up against it. It’s warm. And as it swings inwards, the hinges shriek like brakes …

More about the book

Slade House is still one of the most enjoyably, deliriously frightening novels I’ve read in ages. There’s always acres of soul-searching when it comes to Mitchell and exactly which genre we should put him in. Judging by the contained, gleeful, skin-crawling brilliance of Slade House, his publishers should be pushing him towards the “scary Halloween story” slot as often as they can. – Alison Flood

Read the full review.

Buy the book

Slade House by David Mitchell is published by Sceptre at £7.99 and is available from the Guardian bookshop for £6.55.