Last year, prompted by a suggestion from a reader, David Mitchell serialised a short story called The Right One on Twitter.
This chilling little tale about a young boy caught up in a deadly game of Fox and Hound, originally intended as advance publicity for The Bone Clocks, now forms the opening section of his new novel, Slade House.
The titular residence is an elusive address, accessible by invitation only, and is not so much a home as a honey-trap designed to lure unsuspecting prey into the clutches of its owners, Norah and Jonah Grayer.
Born in 1899, the pair are twins who have immortalised themselves by sealing both the house and their physical selves within in a frozen moment of time, while their spirits live vicariously in the bodies of others.
In order to maintain this stasis, the Grayers must feed off living souls, and once every nine years, on the last Saturday of October, Slade House appears to a specially selected visitor.
Although every ''guest'' is tempted in by different means, once inside its gates they are each trapped in a spiderweb of illusion that leads, inexorably to the long, dark attic within which their hosts await their next meal.
This is in many ways a classic Mitchell novel, divided into sections that cover Slade House's five appearances between 1979 and 2015 and containing the now-familiar references to characters and events in his previous novels.
This time, however, the linkages back to other novels, particularly The Bone Clocks, are much more explicit than previously and in many ways this can be regarded as a dispatch from the front lines of the Horology wars, although Mitchell has thankfully jettisoned much of the esoteric language that so irritated me in his last novel.
But Slade House also functions, for the first four sections at least, just as well as a stand-alone novel.
And the temporal flexibility of Mitchell's writing means new readers can readily transition from here to The Bone Clocks without losing the central narrative thread, at least no more so than they would experience reading them in the opposite order.
Even when Mitchell's destination is obvious, the means by which he reaches it remains delightfully unpredictable, and despite moments of authorial heavy-handedness - Jonah revels in explaining his cunning plot to his helpless victim, an action all readers know presages failure, and the appearance of Dr Iris Marinus-Levy on the scene renders the ending inevitable and a straight set-up for the next instalment in this universe - I thoroughly enjoyed the story.
• Cushla McKinney is a Dunedin scientist.
