A decadent setting offers a mysterious charm where melancholy of other times and gloomy fantasies of what that space can still house are mixed. Echoes of the past, whispers that seem to narrate the chilling causes of this deterioration ..., endless evocations for every observer, listener or reader.
The iron gate, which opens for anyone who wants to enter this fascinating house in a classic middle London neighborhood, anticipates that simple consideration of entry into a space at odds with the rest of a block of flats neighborhood.
The house is there and no one seemed to even dare to think about demolishing it. Not a few have ever entered but none of them offers testimony of what can be seen. The best thing is to go in, be left speechless with that majestic decadence, typical of a gloomy poem by Poe.
The house invites you to continue along the path behind the gate, towards the door of the house. Inside you discover that there may still be someone who inhabits it and a chill runs through your body when you are offered a friendly walk through its rooms, guided by those who still understand those peeling walls as their home.
And sometimes the house stops being the present and becomes what it was. It is not a charm, it is something that combines the material and the emotional. A sinister beauty that arouses some suspicion, an undeniable fear. You don't know if you can't get out of there or if you really don't want to.
A story that grabs you in a different way, succumbing to sensations that flow between a plot of a nineteenth-century everyday life in which you integrate, with the notion that reality is blurring, without knowing if it is something specific or if it can be forever. .
You may want to get out of the house. Which is the same, stop reading, but you can not. Because you will never have inhabited another different reality and your eagerness to know, your curiosity, is a powerful weapon, perhaps a weapon towards self-destruction.
You can now buy the novel The alley house, David Mitchell's new book, here: