Something unexpected happened. As a Reading Group Leader, my initial role in How Writers Read was to guide a group of students through the course. Providing my assistance and knowledge where it was needed. But the cards of the universe shuffled themselves and suddenly I had a group of three students which didn’t quite work with the set up of the course.
How we were supposed to continue the rotation of four books and four blogs with a group of three, it gets tricky. Ultimately, Dr. Kopp and I decided that the best way for me to continue t serve my purpose and my group was to fill the role of the fourth member. Now I have 2 hats. The hat that reads, Reading Group Leader, where I answer questions and guide my group through the course and its methods. And the hat that reads, Group Member 4: Angelina Sakkestad. I have a chance to experience this course in a way that’s different than both the other Reading Group Leaders and the other students.
It’s an interesting feeling to have these two hats. I’m still me. Just a me that feels both like this is the first time I’ve taken this course and the me that has prior knowledge. There’s an opportunity for me to have that caterpillar-butterfly moment.
This unexpected change lead me to Slade House by David Mitchell. Well, really, it was Dr. Kopp who recommended that I propose this book to my group. There was a sneaky glint in his eyes when he said this to me, like there was something about me I didn’t quite know yet. But really, I didn’t need that much convincing. Slade House was already on my “Books to Read” list, waiting patiently.
Slade House is the fantastical horror tale of soul-sucking twins who prey on “the Enlighted” to hold onto their immortality. I know, sounds complicated. The novel starts with Nathan Bishop and his mother, Rita Bishop, as they discover Slade House and ultimately succumb to the forces inside. The following four chapters detail the next four individuals that enter into Slade House, each connected to its predecessor, and building to the demise of Slade House.
With Dr. Kopp’s knowing look in the back of my mind, my Reading Group Leader hat sitting on standby, my reading for felt skewed as I read this novel. Normally, I read for mimesis first. Let myself succumb to the story and enter into the world of the narrative. But this time, I felt myself reading slower and questioning the narrative time after time after time.
And surprisingly, I enjoyed reading like this. It didn’t feel like I was reading a required text for a grade, for an essay, for school. It felt like I had something to discover. Looking back, and as I write this, I think my stake in this novel has just revealed itself to me. I was letting myself (finally) be changed as a reader. Literally. Not in the way I think or analyze a piece of writing, but literally how I read has changed. It’s slowed down, taken its time, and allowed for secrets to be revealed to me that otherwise would have been missed, glossed over.
My change in reading had affected my ability to identify the premise of the novel. Originally, I was thinking of a fairly simple premise, nothing complicated: What if there were soul-suckers in the world? Well, yes, that’s literally what’s happening in Slade House. The soul-suckers make for the surface level of the conflict. But this premise nagged at me. There was something missing, some sort of deeper layer. Then I reworded some things… and came up with this version: What if something threatened to destroy your soul?
This second version feels a bit more holistic, like it addressed more than our soul-sucking twins Norah and Jonah. The first premise follows the idea of Norah and Jonah as our main antagonists with clear intentions of evil, which would reflect the novel… If Dr. Marinus didn’t change the game in the last chapter. Dr. Marinus added this whole other dimension to the manipulation of souls in the novel. The simple existence of soul-suckers no longer felt appropriate since Dr. Marinus doesn’t take the twin’s souls but destroys them (mostly). The second version felt like it showed both sides of the same coin, two possible answers to the same question.
So, What if something threatened to destroy your soul? What would you do? If you’re the first four victims in this novel, you do your best to survive and ultimately cannot stop your soul from being eaten. But then the script gets all flipped around in the last chapter. Here, we can clearly see the premise at play.
The twins have played their part well in luring Dr. Marinus into their trap. She is moments away from swallowing a pill that will render her helpless from the inevitable soul-sucking until this happens:
“Uh…could I just ask a question?” asks Marinus.
“Fire away,” says Jonah, not taking his eyes off his iPhone.
“Why in the eleven thousand and eleven names of God would I oblige two parasitic soul-slayers by imbibing their poison?”
(Mitchell 223)
And now Marinus has control over the twins. What does Dr. Marinus do when her soul is threatened? She takes control and beats the twins at their own game. Here, she is embodying the counter controlling idea of the novel.
Let me explain. A controlling idea, as defined by Mckee, is something that “may be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end” (115). This is what the other victims had been following. The controlling idea is: Being weak and docile leads to being taken advantage of. Each victim before had some weakness or docility in them that had them blind to the twin’s tricks.
On the other hand, the twins operated within the counter controlling idea. The counter idea as the opposition to the controlling idea. I identified it as: One must be clever and perceptive in order to survive. Up until now, they were able to predict each victim. Their thoughts, their desires, every vulnerability and weak spot was available to the twins. Dr. Marinus, on the other hand, played in both ideas. She began with playing the victim, going along with the charade the twins had set up. It’s in this single moment that the doctor enters into the counter idea, forcing the twins into the controlling idea. Now it is the twins that are weak and docile. Marinus had used her perceptiveness to her advantage and took control.
To really illustrate the changing values in this last chapter, the following image is a value graph. This graph charts the values throughout the chapter, moments that are negative and positively charged. It’s the funky bit at the end where the magic really happens.
Marinus catches the twins off guard. She knows their tricks, every single one. She is so perceptive of their reactions that she’s able to use Jonah’s anger against him to finally destroy his soul. Then she needs to confront Norah, who turns out to be slightly more complicated. But still, Marinus is able to separate Norah from this plane of existence and it almost feels like luck that Norah finds another being to inhabit.
It’s interesting and something I haven’t seen in a lot of books where one character is able to single-handedly take control of the narrative. I don’t know what I would do if my soul was threatened but I can dream that I’d be as perceptive and clever as Marinus.
A Reading List By Group 5 
This premise is more fitting than the first one. It reminds me of a church in a way by how souls can be corrupt. What I mean by souls can be bought is by other influences, such as the twins. Norah and Jonah were greedy for their desire to stay alive forever made them become murderers. With those murders, the twins were guilty of gluttony, another sin, by how they ate the souls and were selfish by doing so. For whoever the twins ate, the victims became stuck at Slade House. However, it was not the case for Todd, the club members, and Freya, as they were able to move for their souls were not eaten. That’s why Nathan’s, Rita’s, Gordon’s, and Sally’s were corrupted but not by their sins, but because of the twins being greedy and gluttony, that’s what held them captive in the house. So the twins were a form of evil in a way because they murdered for their greedy ways.
It’s interesting because people are tricked in real-life by others’ sins or their need to sin. And that in itself was interesting by how the author brought that into his book but added a supernatural influence than reality, and maybe he did it on purpose, or he did not. Either way, it was brilliant!
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Angelina, I like the way you wanted to relate yourself to Dr. Marinus. My only question for that is, do you really see yourself as her, and does anyone else in that matter? If so why? You said so yourself that this is a horror story, and when it comes to horror stories, people view them in a way where they insert themselves into the situation. They would ask themselves what they would do if they were the character. What I find ironic, is that while you talked about how you questioned the plot, and the themes, and how free you felt from it. Yet at the end, you talk about how you see yourself as Dr. Marinus. That itself is a bit of a contradiction. You might have approached the method of reading a bit differently, but by instinct you still went on to insert yourself into the world anyway right at the end. That is not a bad thing at all, you said so yourself it is a perfectly valid method of reading and that it has been done plenty of times. What I am trying to get at though, is that could we really see ourselves as taking control of the situation by simply questioning everything happening in the story? It feels like if it were that simple, there wouldn’t be as many victims as there were in the books. I think it also has a lot to do with how Dr. Marinus herself is also someone with magical abilities, and it has more to do with questioning the situations. With that in mind, could any of us really end up surviving like her? I do not think the answer is so cut and dry.
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I love how you start off with the question of “what if there are soul suckers out there? I never thought of that or related this book to my life. But as I think about it we are constantly tricked in real life by others or people we love, whether it’s wrong or right. Throughout your blog you keep bringing up “my soul” as if I am supposed to feel that I am in the book, What if something threatened to destroy your soul? Really stood out to me because I’m not sure what I would do. A part of me thinks how did they get in that position or allow it to happen, especially because all these people are going missing when they visit. But I almost wonder what would they would lure me in with. Every character is there because they are desperate for something that they are missing in their life, so what would mine be? What am I missing? These questions throughout your blog have me on my toes and thinking about what I would do in this situation or who are the soul suckers in my life.
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