The nerve-shredding tension and creeping unease comes with you having to work things out at the characters’ pace. 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). 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.
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. 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. 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 Last House on Needless Street moves away from the historical to the contemporary gothic, but deserves just as much praise and attention.
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. You may think you’ve read this story before, but it’s not what you think…Ĭatriona Ward is no stranger to gothic fiction. In the dark of the forest, among the white birch trees, something lies buried. In the last house on Needless Street lives Ted, his daughter Lauren and cat Olivia.
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