2021/063: The Last House on Needless Street -- Catriona Ward

Killing things is hard, sure, but keeping them safe and alive is much more difficult. Oh boy, do I know about that. [loc. 256]

Ted Bannerman lives in a house with boarded-up windows, the last house on Needless Street. He shares the house with his daughter Lauren and his cat Olivia, both of whom narrate chapters in this novel. Ted is not like other people: it's hard to tell whether he has learning disabilities, or is on the autism spectrum, or is simply misunderstood. He labels people by characteristic rather than name: the Bug-Man, the Chihuahua Lady, the Little Girl with Popsicle. Eleven years before, when Little Girl with Popsicle went missing at the nearby lake, he became the town's scapegoat. Was Ted responsible for the girl's disappearance? Quite a few children have gone missing over the years.

Ted's narrative is cobwebby: vague and full of holes. What happened to Mommy? What happened to the missing girl? Why does Lauren have to go away? What are the gods in the forest?

Olivia the cat has a different perspective on things ("Anyway the trick to life is, if you don’t like what is happening, go back to sleep until it stops." [loc 458]). Lauren seems sweet: did she really try to poison Ted? And Ted's new neighbour, Dee -- who has been searching for her sister's killer for eleven years -- is more rooted in reality than any of the inhabitants of Needless Street.

I've enjoyed and been chilled by Ward's two previous novels (Little Eve and Rawblood) but this was a whole new dimension of uneasiness. Again, an unreliable narrator, except that this time there are multiple narrators; again, a rural setting, but this time it's somewhere in America; again, a strong sense of the supernatural, the gothic. The echoes, the ankou (a Breton 'god with many faces who lives in the graveyards', familiar to Ted from his mother's stories), the gods in the forest, the matryoshka, Dee's compulsive rereading of Wuthering Heights, the way that things in the house are never quite the same from moment to moment ... As the blurb promises, 'You think you've read this story before. That's where you're wrong.'

I keep thinking about the story -- the stories -- told here, and the subtlety with which Ward guides us through it. I keep thinking about Olivia, whose resolution distresses me, though not for the reasons you might assume. (Spoiler: Olivia does not die.) There are other distressing aspects, including child abuse, alcohol abuse, murder, suicide ... And yet, despite some truly horrible moments -- mostly alluded to, rather than explicitly described -- this is a hopeful story, a story about survival, a story with happy endings. I keep telling myself that this is a story with happy endings.

Marvellously written, deeply unsettling, a masterclass in subtle storytelling and distinct narrative voices.