Trigger warnings for moderate discussion of severe child abuse.
Ted Bannerman’s house holds a lot of terrible secrets. In Catriona Ward’s novel, The Last House on Needless House, it’s hard to say if we get to the bottom of everything because each revelation leads to another question. This is the kind of book that I race through—so that I can find out what happens—and then want to go back to the beginning to marvel over the clues the author carefully placed to foreshadow the twists. It also makes me want to go find my bookish friends who like dark psychological fiction and press a copy into their hands so that we can talk about it.
Many voices narrate The Last House on Needless Street. Ted Bannerman speaks frequently. We also hear from his cat, Olivia, who believes that she’s on a mission to protect Ted. There is also Dee, a young woman who never recovered from the loss of her little sister and firmly believes that Ted had something to do with what happened. None of these narrators is reliable. Ted spends a lot of time keeping track of the lies he uses to keep his secrets from others. Olivia is a cat and obviously has a limited perspective on events; for example, she calls all humans teds. Dee is also hiding secrets. She’s been clearly warned away from approaching anyone who might be attached to her sister’s case and some of the things she does to learn more about Ted are very much illegal.
Ted’s house is as much a character as our narrators. I can clearly imagine a house that has very much seen better days. The neighborhood around it is deteriorating as much as the house, as though the entire area is polluted by something malevolent. Kids would skip this house on Halloween even if Ted gave out full-size chocolate bars. The atmosphere of the house is stuffy, dusty, and dim, with only slightly less personality than Hill House.
I don’t want to give away too much about what’s going on in The Last House on Needless Street. Ideally, I could just hand this book to a reader and say, “Trust me,” because a large part of the experience of this book is figuring everything out. Readers, I marveled at the way the plot of this book developed. I was constantly surprised by the twists, but all of the twists made perfect sense. There were clues planted in the book to point me towards what was going on. This book is just so perfectly constructed!