The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

As a young teen, Ward woke up each night feeling a
hand in the small of her back pushing her out of bed.

Review

You should go into this novel knowing nothing about it. I'll do my best to avoid "spoilers" in this part of the review because they really would spoil it.* 

The author writes with sensitivity and the best of intentions, seeking to reveal aspects of how the human mind can work that are puzzling and, possibly, signposts pointing toward a better way of understanding who we are. That sounds pretty heavy, and I suppose it is. I have to admit, though, that I respected this book more than I enjoyed it. The author uses misdirection, unreliable narrators, and slow reveals to keep the reader off balance and guessing for two-thirds of the book. Even as certain truths begin to come clear, other layers remain to be peeled away. Frankly, my patience was tried almost to the point of giving up by all this peeling away. I'm glad, however, that I did stick with it. The author rewards your patience, though perhaps only just.

While The Last House on Needless Street uses certain tropes of the horror novel, it is not, in the end, what it appears to be. The author herself admits the novel is "disguised as horror." However you decide to categorize it, the work sits more comfortably at the literary than at the genre end of the spectrum. It has garnered high praise from many critics, but I found it only mildly interesting and not entirely convincing.

I have more to say, but in doing so I have to give away some of the twists. I've moved the rest of the review to a new section below the footnote.

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*And, by all means, avoid looking at the author's afterword and end notes for the book until you have either finished reading it or until you've gotten at least two-thirds of the way through.

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Commentary with Spoilers

The Last House on Needless Street attempts to show how a mind can deal with trauma through dissociative identity disorder (DID), which used to be known as multiple personality disorder. In the early chapters of the book, we see events unfolding through different first-person perspectives -- a man named Ted, his daughter Lauren, and his cat Olivia -- as well as from the perspective of a young woman named Dee who suspects the Ted of having abducted and/or murdered her sister Lulu when the sister was a young girl. As the story unfolds, we suspect Ted's "daughter" is really the abducted girl and that perhaps the "cat" is really a second personality Lauren/Lulu has created to deal with the abuse dealt out by Ted. 

Dee buys the house next door to Ted's house and uses it as a base to spy on his activities. As she does so, she becomes more and more certain that Lulu is a prisoner in the house, though at one point she breaks into the house and doesn't discover her. Ted makes trips to see a psychiatrist who he tries to fool, trying to get information about how to deal with Lauren by describing situations on TV shows that he makes up. The psychiatrist isn't fooled, except that he really is fooled in a way that finally becomes clear. Like Dee, the psychiatrist believes that Ted may be abusing a young girl that he is holding prisoner. He doesn't report his suspicions, though, because he wants to use Ted as the subject for a book.

But Lauren doesn't exist. She is another facet of Ted's personality. As is Olivia. It is Ted who was abused as a child, and Ted whose personality has fragmented into separate "people." All those years ago, when Lulu disappeared, it was Dee who was responsible for her falling onto the rocks at the nearby lake. Dee began to run away in a panic, but turned back when she realized her little sister might not be dead, When she returned to the rocks, the little girl was gone. Dee saw someone driving away with the body and came to believe it was Ted who stole the dying child, but it was Ted's mother. Ted's mother saw it all, and Ted's mother liked to perform "experiments."

There are more twists and turns, but this is the essence of the book. The author keeps the reader disoriented and guessing through most of the book, which isn't a bad thing at all. Nevertheless the story is filled with implausible coincidences and convenient plot devices that, for me at least, make the whole thing hard to swallow. Ward might have gotten away with those infelicities in a more fast-paced or thrilling narrative.