Some books arrive with a great deal of preamble…pre-publication buzz from industry giants like Stephen King and Paul Tremblay, massive promotion, and being considered a launch title for a brand new imprint from the genre’s largest publisher. This is what surrounds the U.S. publication of Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street.
In a boarded-up house on a dead-end street at the edge of the wild Washington woods lives a family of three.
A teenage girl who isn’t allowed outside, not after last time.
A man who drinks alone in front of his TV, trying to ignore the gaps in his memory.
And a house cat who loves napping and reading the Bible.
An unspeakable secret binds them together, but when a new neighbor moves in next door, what is buried out among the birch trees may come back to haunt them all.
Ted Bannerman is a reclusive man, he lives with his daughter Lauren and his cat Olivia. His habits keep him fairly regimented, as we “meet him” on the anniversary of “Little Girl with Popsicle.” Ted isn’t the only voice we hear in the narrative, Lauren and Olivia both give us their perspective. Through Ted’s daily routines, we learn about his past, including his trouble childhood, and his connections to the woods just at the end of his street and his suspicions of a murderer living in his neighborhood. Outside of Ted’s house, we are told of a girl who disappeared maybe a decade prior to the start of the novel, and how her sister Dee obsessively is trying to find the sister she called Lulu. Dee finds herself focused on Ted as the possible kidnapper. This all seems rather straightforward, aside from maybe getting the perspective of Olivia the Cat. Of course, the novel is much more than that description and any further exploration of exactly how the story of these characters unfold would be spoilers.
Instead, I’ll touch on what works. Ward masterfully sets the mood for the novel, there’s a bleakness and gloom that pervades everything throughout and all of the characters. Ted is paranoid, Lauren feels Ted is being far too much of an over-protective father, Olivia the cat blacks out, and Dee’s lost sister has destroyed both her and her family. Another strong element of The Last House on Needless Street is the tension and suspense…Ward weaves the story from character to character in a way that makes setting aside the book rather difficult, she pulls of that wonderful trick of ending a chapter with the kind of energy that keeps the book in your hand. Her ability to vacillate between such well-realized characters managed to keep me off balance, continually questioning everything about the story and specifically the reliability of the characters themselves as telling the “truth.” The reliability of these voices comes into question even more when Ted visits his therapist, whom he dubs the “bug man” and does not trust. These four points of view characters come alive, in all of their foibles, idiosyncrasies, and pains. Despite the pervading gloom; however, Ward gives some small sparks of hope in some passages and in the end.
In so many ways, The Last House on Needless Street is a puzzle of a book. As the novel draws to its potent conclusion, the whole of the story comes together in a fashion that sheds light on hints that were placed in the earliest portions of the novel. There are some eerie elements to the novel, some reality-questioning elements, and of course the dark elements that land this one in the horror genre. That said, it will appeal to readers who don’t necessarily gravitate to the horror genre.
In some ways, I was very much reminded of Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts. There’s a lot going on in the narrative under the surface that bubbles up on the conclusion. Both novels lingered in my head long after I finished reading them. The Last House on Needless Street is an immersive, head-shaking, game of a novel that speaks to the horrors of a person’s past and how a horrific event can leave people unchanged for the worse.
Impressive.
© 2021 Rob H. Bedford
Published by Tor Nightfire | September 2021
Excerpt: https://www.torforgeblog.com/2021/07/14/excerpt-the-last-house-on-needless-street-by-catriona-ward/
https://tornightfire.com/catalog/the-last-house-on-needless-street-catriona-ward/
https://tornightfire.com/download-a-free-digital-preview-of-catriona-wards-the-last-house-on-needless-street/
https://twitter.com/Catrionaward
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
