The Last House on Needless Street
Catriona Ward
Macmillan-Tor/Forge
Tor Nightfire
SYNOPSIS:
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.
REVIEW:
I’ll warn you up front: The Last House on Needless Street is not an enjoyable book. And it doesn’t try to be. Overall, it’s an unsettling read. Anxiety and uneasiness spread across every page as Ward spins her claustrophobic tale through the haunted eyes and emotionally damaged minds of a succession of unreliable narrators. The tension mounts throughout because the reader never experiences the sensation of standing on solid narrative ground, the fiction equivalent of spotting something creepy out of the corner of your eye. And no matter how fast you look, whatever you thought you saw remains a disturbing mystery yet somehow manages to crawl under your skin. While The Last House on Needless Street reads like a haunted house novel, it’s really a story of haunted lives.
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