The Last House on Needless Street

The Last House on Needless Street is a horror novel by the American-born British writer Catriona Ward, published in 2021. Its story is told in several first-person voices, and the reader is not meant to take any one of them entirely at face value.

Three of those voices share a boarded-up house at the end of a dead-end street on the edge of the woods outside a small town. Ted is a man who drinks in front of the television and loses stretches of his memory; Lauren is a teenage girl he keeps inside; and Olivia is a cat who reads the Bible.

Into that household comes a new neighbour, and with her a reminder that a child went missing from the area years before. Ted has always been a suspect in the town's eyes even though nothing was ever proved, and having someone nearby who is paying attention unsettles the fragile arrangement inside the house.

Ward builds the novel so that the truth about what happened has to be pieced together from accounts that contradict each other, and the weight of the book lies in what the characters are protecting themselves from. It is a standalone title.