At the end of Needless Street is forest. In the last house on Needless Street lives Ted, his daughter Lauren and cat Olivia. In the dark of the forest, among the white birch trees, something lies buried. Murder. A missing child. Revenge. You may think you’ve read this story before, but it’s not what you think…
Catriona Ward is no stranger to gothic fiction. She’s the only author to have won the August Derleth Prize for Best Horror Novel at the British Fantasy Awards twice—once in 2016 for her debut, Rawblood, and again in 2019 for her second, Little Eve—and has also been shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award, a WHSmith Fresh Talent title, and won the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award. The Last House on Needless Street moves away from the historical to the contemporary gothic, but deserves just as much praise and attention.
It’s a difficult book to review however, as the less you know about the plot going in, the better (though the title reminds me of the house on Neibolt street from IT, it’s not a spoiler for me to say that there aren’t any clowns hanging around in storm drains), but I’ll do my best.
The story is told from multiple points of view: Ted, Olivia (yes you heard that right, the cat), Dee—Ted’s new neighbour, and Lauren. None of them are reliable. They withhold information from the reader, from each other, and even from themselves, the mutability of memory—especially in regard to trauma—being a key theme. In her author’s note (which, again, don’t read before you finish the book as it gives away the major twist) Ward describes it as “ a story about survival, disguised as a book about horror.” This is a pretty good thumbnail description. Ward takes a well-worn horror device and portrays it in a way that’s much more sympathetic, less superficial, but without making it any less scary (because the survival itself and the things survived are pretty horrific).
The nerve-shredding tension and creeping unease comes with you having to work things out at the characters’ pace. Ted and Lauren’s voices are childlike, Lauren because she is a child; Ted, it becomes apparent, due to serious emotional and psychological trauma. This is achieved not through making the language overly simplistic but by highlighting his naivete and inability to express himself or his understanding in a complex way, as you’d expect an adult to be able to do, naming people by their physical characteristics, literal and figurative, or by associations—“Man with Orange Juice Hair”, “Chihuahua Lady”, “Bug-Man”—for example. Olivia is limited by her understanding as a cat and Dee is ruthlessly single-minded, her life essentially halting with her sister’s disappearance and the dissolution of her family. And then there is “Mommy”, Ted’s mother, a beautiful but slightly sinister figure, who we gather is no longer around but whose presence nevertheless looms over everything like the spider at the heart of a web. Ted frequently loses time, and what appear to be occasional inconsistencies and contradictions between the different narrators may frustrate at first, but gradually the clues begin to emerge and the puzzle pieces fall into place, revealing a chilling picture.
But even though the journey can be harrowing—seriously, this was a book shaped spoon that scooped out my emotions as if they were ice cream; little wonder that it’s been endorsed by Stephen King amongst others, or that it’s been selected as one of the titles for the second series of the BBC2 book programme Between the Covers—the story ultimately manages to end on a hopeful note: hope that after survival there’s living.
The Last House On Needless Street is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
This is the story of a serial killer. A stolen child. Revenge. Death. And an ordinary house at the end of an ordinary street.
All these things are true. And yet they are all lies…
You think you know what’s inside the last house on Needless Street. You think you’ve read this story before. That’s where you’re wrong.
In the dark forest at the end of Needless Street, lies something buried. But it’s not what you think…
