"The buzz...is real. I've read it and was blown away. It's a true nerve-shredder that keeps its mind-blowing secrets to the very end." —Stephen King Winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel! A World Fantasy Award Finalist! An Indie Next Pick! A LibraryReads Top 10 Pick! A Library Journal Editors' Pick! STARRED reviews from Library Journal and Publishers Weekly! Named one of the "50 Best Horror Books of All Time" by Esquire! "Brilliant....[a] deeply frightening deconstruction of the illusion of the self." —The New York Times Catriona Ward's The Last House on Needless Street is a shocking and immersive read perfect for fans of Gone Girl and The Haunting of Hill House. In a boarded-up house on a dead-end street at the edge of the wild Washington woods lives a family of three. A teenage girl who isn’t allowed outside, not after last time. A man who drinks alone in front of his TV, trying to ignore the gaps in his memory. And a house cat who loves napping and reading the Bible. An unspeakable secret binds them together, but when a new neighbor moves in next door, what is buried out among the birch trees may come back to haunt them all. “The new face of literary dark fiction.” —Sarah Pinborough At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Last House on Needless Street starts in an interesting way, in a somewhat terrifying setup of Ted, a creepy and clearly mentally unwell man, keeping what seems to be a little girl who can't walk and something that thinks of itself as a cat trapped in his house. Where this goes is a completely different direction than you expect at the start and the book is the slow revelation of the truth of the situation, and this is where the hard spoilers begin, so stop right now if you don't want to know. The truth of the situation is that there aren't really three characters -- they are all personalities of a single person, Ted, who was deeply abused as a child and created the girl and the cat as way to protect himself. This story is tied to the story of Dee, who is looking for her missing sister, and believes Ted to be the kidnapper. Where Ward's novel works is that the setup with Ted and Dee connect in a natural way (i.e. you assume that Dee's sister is the 'little girl' Ted is keeping) only to have that slowly be exposed as false. But the execution of this doesn't work. Ward did her homework in terms of trying to depict accurately a split personality disorder, a trope in fiction that typically is depicted in a totally unreal way. She's also quite good at creating false leads; you make the assumptions she wants you to and then fall right into the trap of her reversals. But the details of the story don't make sense. How exactly do the different personalities work? Is Ted actually crawling around the floor as the girl? What is the dark version of the cat? Ward at one point attempts to explain this with a staircase metaphor where different selves are at different levels, but that just makes no sense. And everything about Dee is unnecessary. It feels like Ward just needed to have more horror in the book, so she invented a broken, flawed, and guilty character who could be scared of Ted and then die. Again, it works at the beginning as a set-up, but as the story reveals itself, it's clear that Dee serves no purpose than to be a convenient plot time that can reveal how horrible Ted's mom was. And Dee's death from a snake bite when she's foreshadowing her fear of snakes the entire book was so on the nose that all of us reading it questioned whether Dee wasn't just another personality of Ted as she died. The book just ends on a sour note where the answer to the mystery doesn't satisfy your sense of the facts or live up to the promise of the beginning. It's a clever concept and a worthwhile effort to reform this kind of mental illness story, but Ward's plot decisions didn't work and honestly it's hard for us to imagine how they could have. It's just too clever a premise to pull off and deliver on the horror the novel promised.