The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward
I was very excited when I heard about Tor spinning off horror novels into Tor Nightfire, a smart move of course because in the last few years the horror novel has come raging back to the forefront. So this novel, which appears to be the U.S. edition of a British release of a horror novel by an American novelist living across the pond. With blurbs from favorites like Sarah Pinborough and Paul Tremblay. Giants like Mike Mignola and Stephen King also blurbed this book so I feel like a bit of a poser for never hearing of Catriona Ward before.
Well, mistake fixed she is on my radar now. I know I say this often before I developed a system for reading books without knowing what they are about. I put this on hold and forgot about it until it came in at the library. No clue what it was about. I certainly think the reading experience was more wild for that reason. Here is the strange thing. While I considered this a 5-star book, It was closer to a DNF or a 2-star book than a 4, and I know that doesn’t make sense, but hear me out.
I think this book is great, and impressive but the line between a terror-inducing, bonkers experience and unreadable crap was super thin. I absolutely understand why someone would feel differently than I did. It is very hard to get into why without spoilers. Try to explain the genius of Hitchcock’s take on Psycho without spoiling the Marion Cane twist.
Before I say fuck it and go into spoilers let me say that I found Ward’s writing sublime at times. This book is quotable in a thousand places. Just strange stuff like…
“I am not dead, I can tell, because there is a strand of spaghetti on the green tile floor. What happens after death may be bad or good but there won’t be spilled spaghetti.”
But I could do a hundred examples like that through the course of the novel. Funny, smart, and insightful while being off-beat, bizarro, and just plain creative. So many turns of phrases I was jealous of. The story itself remains better spoken of with a spoiler warning in the rearview mirror but I will say this. It is a puzzle inside of a puzzle. Every time you think you have a handle on it, the goal gets pushed back.
When Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes came out it worried me that they were marketing the ending. How could it live up to the hype? It did. Much is made about the secrets withheld in this book and it is true when they get revealed it is in the same dangerous place as Behind Her Eyes. If you make that far do you accept the ending? It tied the room together like the Dude’s rug and for that reason I suggest this book to ALL lit horror readers.
From the very beginning, the book has a disconnected, and strange first-person style. All the clues are there but the amount of confusion it causes is one hundred on purpose. I am fine with confusion as long as I am entertained. The funny, wry prose was enough to carry me but I get that many readers would not be able to hang. You have to make it to the end but it all pays off. If a cat POV and first-person narrators who lie and contradict each the other narrators or invent characters that don’t exist in one chapter to the next sounds confusing. It is. If you hang it will make sense.
Yeah, I think this is one you should read.
OK Spoilers….
I going to assume you read the book or don’t care about spoilers. The first clue was from the cat on page 58 of the hardcover. I just thought it was a cute gag to have the cat be a POV character and first-person narrator. It was a relic of earlier draft according to the afterword but smart. The Last House on Needless Street on the surface appears to be a novel taking a massive dump on the rules of first-person. It is not because the twist (you have been warned) is that the POV is a person with Dissociate Identity Disorder. Multiple personalities and they are very different to each other. Part of the fun of the novel is that Ward does an amazing job of holding out details long enough that I read hundreds of pages and guessed incorrectly multiple times what was happening.
So the cat…
“I looked and looked for ways to escape, but there weren’t any. A couple of times I just ran straight at the door when it opened. I am not a natural planner. Ted scooped me up in a friendly sort of way. Then when we were on the couch and he stroked me or we played with a piece of yarn, until I stopped crying. “There are bad people who would hurt you or try to take you away from me.”
Totally normal thing to say to a cat. Well, the people out there who will hurt you part is normal. Not so sure about the "They take you away from me," thing, that is not normal. So it got me thinking, OK Ted what the fuck is up with you? A kid is missing from the lake. They searched your house. Found nothing. Somebody wants to study you. Maybe you have a daughter, she goes away sometimes, where is mom? I had tons of questions about Ted.
People who want answers right away are going to DNF the hell out of this book. For me, the cat finding blood and searching for the flip-flop in the kitchen was when I really started to think I understood. Lauren is not his daughter, and the cat is going to somehow save her. Then the Cat tells us he is not real.
This reveal on page 190 strips another layer comes off the façade. At that point, you think you understand. Fuck Ted am I right? It makes sense that Lauren would invent the cat. When Ted tells us he is protecting her, triple locking etc. We KNOW now that the fucker is crazy, he took the girl at the lake. That is Lauren she invented the cat tried to escape. Hey look at us smart readers we figured it out. Awesome.
There are almost 200 pages left. I kept reading and doubted myself. It was a smart twist to reveal that the cat was made up but in many ways, it throws readers off the scent of the twist.
“The first time I tried to run he took my feet.”
A lazy reader or even me will assume that Ted tortured her, cut off her leg. but the reality the leg is nothing more than an invention of the mind. and if it is not convient for her to have a leg anymore it is gone. We are still to invested in hating creepy Ted. You will hate Ted for such a long period of the book when he ends up bleeding in the woods you won't be ready for another layer but it won't make the effect any less powerful. Wait Ted is bleeding, good. Right? In the back end, you are not even sure who is the dominant personality and by the end, that is not clear. Some of the narrators are evil and some are not.
The line that really got me…
“One of us is imaginary,” she says “and it’s not me.”
Over time the various ways the layers come off reveal problems the characters only begin to accept…
“I had always felt that there was something wrong with me. I was like one of the tracings I did on her baking paper, a bad one, where the comic book underneath slipped; the lines slewed across the page, and the picture became a monstrous version of itself.”
This makes for a powerful ending when it is revealed that the girl in the lake was the POV character's sister, that she was not kidnapped but died in an accident and the whole thing is an elaborate internal cover-up. Yep, this is a powerful ending. What a crazy ride of a reading experience that will leave you shocked and confused. Most importantly for me, I was entertained.
On page 341 when a character comes right out and tells us exactly what is happening with identity disorder but we have been so fooled that our brain rejects it. When Ted in the last chapters sees his mother in the mirror and promises to stop hurting the body if she promises to leave them alone it is heartbreaking. An excellent conclusion that wraps it all together.
The marketing of this book is hilariously off. For fans of Gone Girl, this book besides having a twist and being good is not a fair comparison. Haunting of Hill House, yeah maybe but that is pure misdirection. This novel is in a tradition with Robert Bloch’s Psycho but it is so much more expansive and experimental.
Overall Genius and will be on my top ten of the year for sure.
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