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" Speaking\u00A0with David Mitchell is a lot like having\u00A0tea with a telephone operator, albeit the wisest, most enthralling\u00A0telephone operator you&amp;#039;ve ever met. Soft-spoken with\u00A0a stiff and\u00A0proper middle-class\u00A0accent,\u00A0the Englishman kindly asks\u00A0what books you&amp;#039;ve read lately, your age, and what the weather outside is like. He&amp;#039;s in Ireland, he says, it&amp;#039;s sunny and bright, and more than once you have to remind yourself,\u00A0This is David Mitchell.\u00A0 Mitchell\u00A0is the author who created\u00A0his own\u00A0&amp;quot;Middle Earth&amp;quot;\u00A0in works like the bestselling 2004 novel\u00A0Cloud Atlas, later\u00A0adapted by the Wachowskis into\u00A0a film starring Tom Hanks, and\u00A0last year&amp;#039;s seminal genre-bender,\u00A0The Bone Clocks, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. He&amp;#039;s\u00A0a household name, synonymous with bestsellers,\u00A0but nothing about his work is bland or predictable.\u00A0Slade House\u00A0(Random House), due October 27, picks up where his 6,000-word Twitter story, &amp;quot;The Right Sort,&amp;quot; left off, at the entrance to a house down the road from a working-class British pub,\u00A0where an odd brother and sister extend invitations to outcasts. I spoke with Mitchell by phone about his new\u00A0novel, writing ghost stories, and the virtues of\u00A0Twitter.\u00A0 In an interview with The New York Times\u00A0last year, you\u00A0called\u00A0yourself a meglomaniac\u00A0bent on controlling your universe of characters. But\u00A0Slade House\u00A0is much more pared down than, say,\u00A0The Bone Clocks.\u00A0Did you finally come to grips with your desire for &amp;quot;maximum scale&amp;quot;?\u00A0 It&amp;#039;s a very compact story. Slade House has elements of mystery, elements of the Psycho story. Because of its\u00A0beating ghostly twin hearts, this means that this is\u00A0probably classified as a ghost story, and there&amp;#039;s no such thing as a ghost story. Once it goes over a certain length, it&amp;#039;s no longer a ghost story.\u00A0  Did you set out to write a ghost story initially? In the first part of Slade House, &amp;quot;The Right Sort,&amp;quot; before The Bone Clocks was published, I set out to answer some of the questions that\u00A0story asked. That led me to convert\u00A0it from\u00A0Twitter into more standard prose. And in doing so, I suppose it&amp;#039;s turned into a sweeter ghost story. A quintet of them. Each of them has a\u00A0slightly different answer to the question that all ghost stories pose: What&amp;#039;s going on here? Are there supernatural presences here? Can they harm us? Very quickly, one thing leads to another.\u00A0Did I set out to do it? Hardly, but now it has its own logic. The logic ends up asking a lot of the questions and then answering them for you. And that process is most of the power now. With luck, it all goes well.\u00A0 I&amp;#039;ve read that\u00A0you aren&amp;#039;t\u00A0a big\u00A0fan of Twitter, or at least felt coerced into joining\u00A0it\u00A0by your agent. How do you feel about using it\u00A0now?\u00A0 It got addictive, actually. I&amp;#039;m still not a\u2026 I wouldn&amp;#039;t describe myself as 100 percent a Twitter advocate. I&amp;#039;m interested less as a private citizen who prefers not to share too much information about myself, and\u00A0more as, if you&amp;#039;ll allow me the word, as an artist, where I feel like I have the potential to do what I already do, which is to create narratives, wind them up, and see where they go. And then I&amp;#039;m very interested indeed in Twitter because\u00A0it&amp;#039;s another way to tell a story. And it&amp;#039;s pretty brand new. It&amp;#039;s only a few years old. You get to feel that you&amp;#039;re working at things that haven&amp;#039;t been worked out before.\u00A0 Going back to Slade House, I&amp;#039;m wondering how easy it was for you to make the novel\u00A0compact, and if not, what some of the\u00A0other challenges were to writing it.\u00A0 If you have The Bone Clocks for dinner, then Slade House works as a kind of dessert. It still needs to work as independent narrative, for sure. But making it compact?\u00A0That was a piece of cake because it&amp;#039;s hard to make a ghost story not compact\u2014they ask to be short. They&amp;#039;re usually a lot shorter, but since I&amp;#039;ve got a quintuplet structure, I took variations on the same story and laid them on each other. Then the repetition makes it work. You can then use an expectation against the reader.\u00A0  Fear. The challenge is really fear. Fear is a really hard thing to do with text... [This story]\u00A0isn&amp;#039;t a real world. It&amp;#039;s being formulated through my head, through the screen, and the place through the pixels onto the page.\u00A0To tap into this primal fear circuitry\u2014that&amp;#039;s hard. And you never actually know if you&amp;#039;ve succeeded. You get an idea from readers you trust, who have no reason to be nice to you. But the hardest thing is to write fear in the mind of the reader.\u00A0 So much of an author&amp;#039;s work is autobiographical, which was somewhat the case with your 2006 novel, Black Swan Green. Was\u00A0there some kind of catharsis to\u00A0writing about outsiders in Slade House?\u00A0Why choose marginal people for Jonah and Norah\u00A0to\u00A0pick off? It feels vampiric because they&amp;#039;re easy to pick off. They&amp;#039;re not members of the running herd, they&amp;#039;re already on the edges. A lot of antagonists are interested in these characters. Maybe there is\u00A0an identification between myself and outsiders. If you are a socially\u00A0high-functioning, socially well-adjusted, cheerful, sane, balanced individual with fantastic interpersonal skills, you really don&amp;#039;t become a novelist. We wouldn&amp;#039;t be here in the first place [laughs]. There&amp;#039;s a gravitational pull, which you do have to resist,\u00A0to create minds that are not a million miles away from your own. Maybe that&amp;#039;s my next assignment. I would agree with your statement that many of my protagonists are outsiders. I wonder if we all are, and even people who don&amp;#039;t think they are, and\u00A0they&amp;#039;re just better at masking it. When we shut our bedroom door at night, however\u00A0well-integrated we think we are with\u00A0the rest of society, maybe there&amp;#039;s something illusory about that...\u00A0God, that&amp;#039;s a downer. What&amp;#039;s my favorite cake? Let&amp;#039;s talk about that.\u00A0 How do you keep yourself from growing bored with your characters,\u00A0with the universe you&amp;#039;ve created?\u00A0 Same way you keep from growing bored with the universe outside your books:\u00A0by recognizing curiosity is one of the greatest gifts we&amp;#039;re born with. It behooves us to nurture it. It&amp;#039;s something we should feed endlessly. Being bored is almost incomprehensible. Even if it&amp;#039;s being vicious and repetitive, it&amp;#039;s still amazing. [laughs]\u00A0Within a meter, where you are, are all these objects. Curiosity and boredom, those aren&amp;#039;t factors of what you have and what you&amp;#039;ve done;\u00A0they&amp;#039;re factors of what you perceive. Curiosity will immunize you against boredom. With that in mind, what do like to read? And what have you been reading lately?\u00A0 I am reading a book by an early 20th century Japanese writer, Natsume Soseki, called\u00A0The Miner\u00A0that was\u00A0just translated into English, and it&amp;#039;s great. He&amp;#039;s a great stylist. And the conversation is pretty good, too. It&amp;#039;s about a rich kid who runs away and decides he&amp;#039;s going to end it all. But before he\u00A0has a chance to end it all, he gets secreted by a group of copper\u00A0miners and taken\u00A0to this turn of the 20th century coal mine and gets taken underground.\u00A0He&amp;#039;s just in this other tribe and he&amp;#039;s so much a fish out of water, so out of his element. And you get to see how ghastly the conditions were. I normally read\u00A0books I need for what I&amp;#039;m working on, research books. Books written by people who need to answer the same kind of questions that I&amp;#039;m working on. Books that I&amp;#039;ve amassed over the years. I&amp;#039;m trying to read the classics, Greek and Roman classics, because they&amp;#039;ve been around for two\u00A0millennia, so I feel like I owe it to them. There&amp;#039;s something profound and life-enhancing about them. I read books that my 13-year-old&amp;#039;s really hooked on. I read the things my wife reads so we have something to talk about in the long, wintry night of the fourteenth year of our marriage.\u00A0Sometimes the\u00A0god of serendipitous things brings books into your home that you never expected.\u00A0It creeps upon you with age. The older you get, the further back you feel a hunger for reading.\u00A0 So that\u00A0explains why you&amp;#039;ve been\u00A0reading Greek classics.\u00A0 Your view of that time changes. These people don&amp;#039;t feel like impossibly distant specks down the reverse telescope of time.\u00A0 That&amp;#039;s actually something I&amp;#039;ve been thinking about a lot lately\u2014and what struck me about The Bone Clocks. For Marinus and the other horologists whose souls were\u00A0reincarnated, immortality seemed rather lonely. You lived forever, but everyone dies.\u00A0Relationships end. You&amp;#039;re left all alone.\u00A0 It&amp;#039;d be very lonely to be immortal.\u00A0It&amp;#039;s like you&amp;#039;re\u00A0in the same school and you&amp;#039;re growing older, but the kids never are.\u00A0You stay there getting old and embittered with hair growing out of places you never thought of, which really does happen, by the way [laughs]... Immortality is a very double-edged suspect.\u00A0 One function of The Bone Clocks was just to cheer myself up about getting older. It was just to persuade myself that, actually, what we know anyway\u2014but quite often\u00A0forget\u2014is that death is a\u00A0part of the binding\u00A0contract of life.\u00A0We shouldn&amp;#039;t see it as a big, scary grim reaper. Don&amp;#039;t have the stupid argument;\u00A0don&amp;#039;t spend this day in a funk;\u00A0and don&amp;#039;t waste it on all this nonsense.\u00A0Just calm your ego to Hell, nothing else matters.\u00A0 In Slade House, at least toward the end, when we get to\u00A0peer\u00A0inside the minds of Jonah and Norah, it&amp;#039;s as if you&amp;#039;re poking fun at the very idea of\u00A0death itself. Perhaps because they\u00A0seem to be bumbling morons.\u00A0 Evil is rather dumb and\u00A0banal where it occurs in the real world. It&amp;#039;s awful in monsters,\u00A0but not terribly interesting. So in chapter\u00A0five, the story is told from Jonah and Norah&amp;#039;s point of view.\u00A0The moment you&amp;#039;re in their skit, you can see that, yes, they&amp;#039;re part of this extraordinary machine, but they&amp;#039;re human, and to be a human sometimes\u00A0is to be a bumbling moron.\u00A0The cost-benefit for the reader is that they&amp;#039;re\u00A0no longer this\u00A0sketchy, shadowy presence. The benefit is that they&amp;#039;re these rounded, grounded people that are interesting, and you start to believe in them more.\u00A0 Can we expect to see\u00A0more of Jonah and Morah or the other characters in\u00A0Slade House?\u00A0 I have future plans for Marinus, and I want to write a book set at some point 20 years after The Bone Clocks with Marinus in it. Marinus has had a bit of a humble oeuvre becoming something of a heroic figure, and\u00A0every figure requires a villain. Marinus didn&amp;#039;t have one, and now he or she has one\u2014an arch nemesis in Avengers ensemble terms.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/q-and-a/a38690/david-mitchell-on-his-new-novel/>