When Dee walks through the front door in Catriona Ward’s recent thriller The Last House on Needless Street, readers of gothic fiction find themselves in a familiar place. The house is “an underworld; a deep cave where lonely shafts of light fall on strange mounds, jagged broken things. Plywood is nailed over all the windows,” and the “whole place smells of death; not of rot or blood but dry bone and dust; like an old grave, long forgotten”.
Dee is investigating the disappearance of her younger sister Lulu, 11 years earlier, and the trail has led her to Ted Bannerman, a strange loner who lives at the edge of the woods with his cat Olivia, and occasionally his daughter, Lauren. Lurking next door, Dee hears scratching and scrabbling through the walls; late at night she sees a face at her window, “eyes gleaming like lamps, filled with the light of death”; her creepy neighbour’s undergrowth seems to writhe with snakes: “she sees them everywhere, their shadowed coils”. But are these visions real, or products of Dee’s troubled mind – and exactly what are the horrors that haunt Ted’s house?
