The Last House on Needless Street. Catriona Ward. 2021.
Well I feel a little silly.
I said some stuff about the last two horror novels I read (by Kingfisher and King) that could just as easily apply here. The haunted house metaphor is made obvious. Lessons are learned. Trauma is explicitly explored as trauma. Things are resolved. Punches are pulled - things do not get as dark and bleak and nasty as they could, given the subject matter.
And you know what, it works anyway. When something works it works. Good for Catriona Ward, proving that if you’re good enough at telling your story, it doesn’t matter what kind of story you’re telling or what you include or don’t.
I really don’t want to talk about what happens in this book, because if you do read it you should do it cold. I’m glad I did - I really thought I had it figured out, and I didn’t, at all. Ward performed a very impressive sleight of hand; she knows what people expect from certain books and certain characters. You can read this story as a send up, not just of haunted house horror but of true crime and the type of people - mostly women - who are obsessed with it. It’s a nasty book. But it’s kind, too.
Here’s what I can tell you about it. There’s a man named Ted. Sometimes he lives alone. Sometimes he doesn’t. There is a young woman named Dee, who believes that Ted took her sister from her years ago. Dee moves to Ted’s neighborhood to find proof of his crimes, and for other reasons.
This book did so many things I usually don’t like, and I still liked it. That’s technique for you, I suppose, or maybe it comes from a grownup way of looking at art as something that can and should surprise you, rather than as a handy feeling delivery service that gives you exactly what you want and nothing more. This did work as a feeling delivery service though - I can’t remember the last horror novel I read that scared me quite this much. I was highly, highly impressed.