4. The Last House on Needless Street

By Catriona Ward

Last fall, I called Dark Carnival to inquire if he had Rawblood, Ward’s debut novel – he didn’t, so I ordered a copy via Abe Books.  When I was physically at the store during the Christmas holiday, there was one copy of Ward’s 2021 novel, The Last House on Needless Street, so I bought it as my only purchase – gotta support Dark Carnival somehow!

 

TLHoNS, like Rawblood, has a non-linear narrative that builds up to a 'shocking' twist at the end, but unlike its predecessor, it was not nearly as impactful nor as effective, partly because it jumps between the POVs of the four main characters.  Ted Bannerman lives in a boarded up house on a dead-end street at the edge of the woods (in the state of Washington, I believe).  He’s a loner, but seems like a normal enough guy -- he has a cat named Olivia and there’s a young girl, Lauren, who may or may not be his daughter.  A young woman, Dee, moves into the empty house next door and seems very friendly.  But Dee’s true motives are revealed early on in the book.  Ever since the traumatic disappearance of her younger sister Lulu, Dee has been obsessed with finding the kidnapper/killer, and she has zeroed in on Ted.

There was no ballet school because there was no money to pay for it.  She didn’t finish high school either.  Dee got a job at the drugstore. But she had her real work, which was to look for the person who took her sister. All the men who had been at the lake that day, all the glances, the roll call of suspects. They are her job now.

     She calls tired Karen each week, sometimes more. Tired Karen is the detective in charge of Lulu’s case and she always sounds both exhausted and frantic. Her face is expressive; it shows all the hurt she has seen; every back she has patted, every tissue hane over, every screaming face pushed close to hers.

     She and Dee were close, for a time. The detective felt sorry for Dee, a young girl with no one. Call me Karen. She told Dee things when she called. Now she just says, “We’re working on it.”

The chapters titled "Ted" were written in the first person.  And the chapters titled "Dee" and "Olivia" were written from their respective POVs in the third person.  So there’s a lot of back and forth and timeline jumping, and you can just tell there's going to be some big-time unreliable narration going on.  Further, the big twist relies on DID (dissociative identity disorder) as a plot device. 

Here’s the spoiler:  there are strong hints that Lauren is not Ted's daughter, but a captive, who has been living with Ted and his cat Olivia for some time, and the novel really tries to make out that Ted is the mentally fragile captor.  Also Lauren and the cat can communicate with each other, but only when Ted is passed out drunk or asleep.  Here's a creepy sample:

     “I’ve been trying to speak to you,” she (Lauren) says. “Had to find a time when he didn’t stop my mouth too tight, when he was asleep and the music wasn’t too loud. I wrote notes. I slipped them into his pocket, his pants, anywhere I could reach… You didn’t find them I guess but he didn’t either so that’s good.  Luck he’s so drunk, always.”

     I row uselessly and turn in circles. I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry …

     …”You’re always sorry,” she says, sounding more like her old self. “Always trying to make him feel better.”

     Oh, how could he? I say. To lock up his own daughter like this…

     She gives a tired little laugh. “Grow up, Olivia. I’m not his daughter.”

     But you call him Dad.

     “He calls me kitten when I’m good—does that mean I’m a cat?”

     I shudder and my tail lashes. He calls me kitten, I say.

    “I know,” she says. “There have been lots of kittens over the years.”

As the narrative progresses, we learn that it was actually Ted’s mother, a sadistic Nurse Ratched type, who had kidnapped Dee’s sister, and it was Ted’s mother who was the deranged psychopath who would torture and perform experiments on her own son.  All along it was Ted’s mother who made him believe that he was a monster. 

“…For a long time, I have feared that this was in you. Now it is confirmed. I find that it is a relief. I no longer need to think of you as my son. No longer must I search my heart for a love I cannot feel.”

     I cried out and tears welled hot in my eyes. “You can’t mean that,” I said. “Please don’t say that.”

     “It is the truth.” She did look down at me, now. Her eyes were remote and serious. “You are monstrous. However, you are my responsibility. I will continue to do what I can for you, because that is my duty, and I have never been afraid of my duty. I will not permit you to be called ‘insane.’ In this country, in particular, they love to throw that word around like a ball.”

As a result, Ted developed DID as a survival coping mechanism, and thus, Olivia the cat and Lauren the girl were born out of Ted’s fragmented mind.  So Ted had never kidnapped nor harmed anyone.  I had to revive my memory by reading this helpful summary.

 

In terms of reader reviews, they seemed to be split into two camps:  those who were disappointed by the reliance of the tired old DID plot device, and those who loved the book, with varying degrees of interpretation.

It seems there is a fetishization of DID in modern culture. A box office peep show into the unquiet mind. How many times have we seen people with DID portrayed as dangerous psychopaths and serial killers?

Fact: People living with DID are more likely to be victims of crime, not the ones who commit them.

 

DID is born mostly out of childhood trauma whereby a sophisticated defense system is created to exile feelings or memories that are simply too unbearable to withstand.

The most famous use of DID was in the 1957 mystery film, The Three Faces of Eve (when it was more commonly known as split personality disorder).  So we’ve had over 60 years of mysteries and thrillers using DID as a narrative device by the time The House on Needless Street was published in 2021.

 

To Ward’s credit, she did do a fair amount of research regarding this mental condition. (apparently two year's worth). There were 38 sources cited in the back of the book and in the afterword, she explained the effort she put into trying to write Ted with empathy.

This is how I came to write a book about survival, disguised as a book about horror.  In the summer of 2018 I was writing about a cat and I couldn’t work out why. I had always been fascinated by the apparent ease with which those who lack empathy form strong, passionate attachments with their pets. Serial killer Dennis Nilsen’s dog, Bleep, was the only creature he could be said to have had any functional relationshiop with…. So I thought, Maybe this is the right story, the one I should be working on. Olivia the cat, who lives with Ted and gives him comfort, even though he took a young girl named Lauren and keeps her captive. But it wasn’t working. Ted didn’t seem like a murderer, or a kidnapper… And Olivia didn’t really behave like a cat…

     I was researching the effects of childhood abuse when I came across a video online of a young woman named Encina, who has dissociative identity disorder (DID)… She talked with great frankness and compassion about her younger alter. She treats her as her child, adopting a maternal attitude, taking care of her…  I realized that the book I was writing had never been about a cat named Olivia, a girl called Lauren and a man named Ted. It was about someone who had all these personalities within them. 

     I had heard of DID before.  It’s the staple of many a horror plot.  But watching Encina’s system describe how their personality had diverged in order to deal with abuse, I felt that a piece of the world I had never understood had fallen into place.

 

… I have tried to do justice in this book to the people whose lives are touched by DID—to hold onto what was said to me… Dissociative identity disorder may often be used as a horror device in fiction, but in my small experience it is quite the opposite.  Those who survive, and live with it, are always striving toward the good.

But does years of research make a cliché less contrived?  Whether her characters were evil or pitiable survivors of childhood trauma, Ward still contributed to the stigmatization of a marginalized community for the sake of a cheap plot device.

For me, The House on Needless Street was a disappointing read, especially after the truly distrubing Rawblood.  It wasn't just the reliance on DID either -- it felt like Ward had some ideas that weren’t that original to begin with (a loner, a cat and a captive girl) and concocted a narrative around it.  Reading her explanation in the afterword confirmed it.  

There were also so many unresolved questions.  If Ted was actually harmless, why did he break Lauren’s feet (even if it wasn’t ‘real’, and in his mind)?  They also never found Dee’s body.  Her character also had a twist towards the end where it’s revealed that she was to blame for Lulu’s disappearance, all because she had wanted to kiss a boy as a teenager instead of watching over her sister.  So guilt was Lauren’s motivating factor to seek justice for her sister, yet Dee conveniently got bitten by a snake (are there poisonous snakes in Washington?!), got lost in the woods vainly searching for Lulu, and she is never heard from again!  So did she really die or what?  Ward spent so much time building up Dee's backstory and motivations, only to have her tossed aside like that at the end.  Dee as a character definitely deserved a better fate.