LAs most haunted landmarks and their ghost stories, mapped Curbed LA

Table Of Content

• In this creepy house, no one's who you think they are — not even the cat
• 'Every monster has a story': Catriona Ward on her chilling gothic novel
• El Planeta Streaming: Watch & Stream Online via HBO Max
• Life Without Light: Creatures in the Dark With Sarah McAnulty
• Monster of the Month w/ Colin Dickey: Arctic Ghosts

Ward is a talented storyteller, and she shows that here. “It would be a bad book if I wasn’t afraid of it,” she says, explaining that there’s actually an important emotional element involved in telling and reading stories about our fears, of both the real and the fictional variety. While the novel blurs the boundaries between reality and the supernatural, the haunting nature of the house is left open to interpretation, adding to the overall sense of unease.

The Last House on Needless Street, Nick and more: our pick of the latest paperbacks, September 25, 2021 - The Times

The Last House on Needless Street, Nick and more: our pick of the latest paperbacks, September 25, 2021.

Posted: Sat, 25 Sep 2021 07:00:00 GMT [source]

In this creepy house, no one's who you think they are — not even the cat

Thanks to this revelation, the police recover Lulu’s body and close the case. Ted lives in the shadow of his deceased mother’s influence, sometimes feeling her presence even though she is long dead. He visits a dubious psychologist, whom he calls the “bug man,” to try to help him deal with Lauren’s psychological conditions.

'Every monster has a story': Catriona Ward on her chilling gothic novel

Without spoiling things, I wasn’t completely satisfied with the conclusion of the novel for the simple reason that a story should really only have one Norman Bates, and Last House has several, possibly stressing the limits of verisimilitude for some readers. Having multiple characters prove deeply unreliable as a result of their mental trauma feels like painting outside of the lines. It’s the kind of audacious triple-twist that I feel has been popular ever since Gillian Flynn rose to fame, though few authors, including Catriona Ward, do it quite as well.

El Planeta Streaming: Watch & Stream Online via HBO Max

The novel explores themes of trauma, grief, and the blurred lines between reality and imagination, effectively immersing readers in the psychological depths of its characters. One of the book’s many surprises is that it is partly narrated by Olivia, a fastidious, deeply religious feline who refers to humans as “teds” and gives us an exterior perspective on her unreliable owner. (“Ted is not a very clean ted. His bathroom does not look like the bathrooms on TV.”) Olivia, Ward remarks, owes something to David Sedaris; she provides humorous respite from the otherwise harrowing narrative.

Despite having few settings and many developments which are only consequential as the darker corners of the narrative are exposed, it should prove a steady, engaging read that provokes a great deal of consideration in its wake. Just as the story is potentially growing still, it rises to a very satisfying final act that does a pretty solid job of resolving its admittedly daunting narrative. The heartbeat of The Last House on Needless Street is discordance.

Wild Life: Synchronized Coral Spawning

Ted’s date fails because he cannot get up the courage to approach the woman he lured to a nearby bar. The city sends bulldozers and tractors to the forest behind Ted’s house to create new rest areas. They are dangerously close to where Ted buried his “gods” (pieces of his mother’s remains and her treasured possessions); he frantically moves them to a new spot that night. Dee attempts to follow him, but she retreats due to her fear of snakes. In July of 1974, Bundy abducted and murdered two different women—Janice Ott and Denise Naslund—over the course of an afternoon at Lake Sammamish State Park.

In the most basic sense, The Last House on Needless Street follows the story of Ted, a lonely man who lives in a boarded up house (on Needless Street, naturally) with his 12 year old daughter, Lauren, and his cat, Olivia. Children have been going missing at a nearby lake for some time and a woman named Dee, whose sister disappeared there some years prior, has convinced herself that Ted had something to do with it. For anyone who was willing and able to isolate during the pandemic, the setting of Last House on Needless Street will feel thematically familiar. The characters spend a great deal of time alone, rarely interacting with each other and typically contacting outsiders via the phone or in arranged meetings. It is very much a novel for our times, and this lends to its tension; any one of us could easily have wound up in another house on Needless Street, passing time no better than Ted and Dee do.

Every character, setting, and arc is an askew, asymmetrical thing that shuffles at the edge of the reader’s perception showing a side that does not match its shadow. This is the unreliable narrator taken from element to thesis, and throughout my time with the novel I felt a deep discomfort which underpins all of the events that play out on the pages. When Ted falls asleep, Olivia manages to control her and Lauren’s body. She stabs Ted, only to discover that she and Lauren are other personalities inhabiting Ted’s body. The snakebite weakened her, but Dee is ready to take revenge. However, a little girl’s voice comes from Ted’s mouth, telling her that Ted is not a monster.

Monster of the Month w/ Colin Dickey: Arctic Ghosts

To be fair, it was probably always going to be difficult to know precisely how to classify a story that heavily features a very religious talking gay cat, and that’s before you get to the potential kidnappings and possible serial murder of it all.

That’s not delivered here as a criticism, but rather a testimonial; Last House’s discordant world will linger in your mind, leaving you uneasy, whether you ultimately enjoy the book or not. Dee sets off to find Lulu, hallucinating as she goes deeper into the forest. She recalls the real events of the day at the lake.

There are also the usual lights going on and off and mysterious footsteps. Several ghosts supposedly haunt the bridge, including possibly a worker who fell into the concrete during construction. The 1906 Alexandria, now low-income apartments, has been both one of the fanciest joints in Downtown and a rundown flophouse. Several dancers are said to haunt the second-floor ballroom, an angry teenager hangs around Charlie Chaplin's old suite, and Rudolph Valentino apparently leaves the Knickerbocker occasionally and visits his old 12th-floor suite.

With its release in 2024, readers were left in awe as they delved into the mysterious world within the last house on a seemingly ordinary street. In this article, we will explore the enigmatic ending of the novel, shedding light on its twists and turns. Additionally, we will present eight interesting facts about the book to further intrigue you.

I experienced a monumental life event whilst reading Last House–the birth of my first child–and thus I did something I never do and read several reviews of the book before sitting down to write my own. I wanted to ensure I hadn’t missed some crucial detail, some pivotal element, some early plot point that my brain may not have absorbed during the wee hours spent sleepless on a hospital room’s couch under COVID quarantine. Never have I witnessed so many professional journalists collectively struggle to say something resonant about a book, to come up with an incisive thought that wasn’t some watered-down cliché or horror novel platitude. The Last House on Needless Street is a difficult title to digest, and I fear many readers will find it unsatisfying once they’ve swallowed (or purged, as may be the case) what lies between its covers.

The novel combines elements of Gothic literature with the thriller genre to create a claustrophobic world where the past is never far from the present, and nothing is truly as it seems. Fear in the dark is what powered her 2015 gothic horror debut, Rawblood, the follow-up Little Eve, and now her breakout third book, The Last House on Needless Street, published on 18 March. Buzz has been building for months around a dark, audacious highwire act of a novel that can be only tentatively described for risk of giving too much away. Whereas Ward’s previous novels were historical chillers set in remote corners of Britain, featuring young women traumatised by cursed families and social oppression, the new book looks at first like a contemporary American thriller. There are horrors hidden in a rundown house on the edge of a forest; a spate of disappearing children; a vulnerable woman searching for answers. Ward introduces us to Ted, a bizarre, childlike loner who lives with his daughter Lauren and cat Olivia – and then pulls the rug, repeatedly, from under the reader’s feet.

Opening with a massacre, it intertwines the fates of two teenage girls – one the killer, one the survivor. The horror here arises from the sadistic control exerted by the damaged patriarch, who creates a toxic family that is also a prison. As soon as you crack open Catriona Ward's The Last House on Needless Street, you know something's very wrong. More than biting into a nice apple and finding a worm, this book is like unexpectedly stepping on the worm barefoot, only to find out the worm isn't a worm — and I mean that in the best way possible. Horror fiction can scare readers, make them anxious, or upset their stomachs, but the most powerful narratives in the genre manage to create an unshakable sense of unease, and that's exactly what this novel does.