The Last House on Needless Street

Named one of the 50 best horror books of all time by Esquire, The Last House on Needless Street (2021) is a psychological thriller by acclaimed author Catriona Ward. Ward is the first woman to win the August Derleth Award for Best Horror twice, for her novels Rawblood and Little Eve, the latter of which also won the Shirley Jackson award for best novel. Ward is American by birth, but studied in England and is a British national. The Last House on Needless Street follows the ill-fated lives of Ted Bannerman, a man with dissociative identity disorder, and Dee Walters, a woman driven to avenge her sister who disappeared 11 years ago. Circumstantial events lead Dee to believe that Ted is responsible for her sister’s disappearance, bringing her to Needless Street to seek revenge. Ted, meanwhile, struggles with balancing self-care with raising his daughter, Lauren, and his God-fearing cat, Olivia. 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.

This guide follows the 2021 Nightfire paperback edition.

Content Warning: This guide contains references to graphic child abuse, death by suicide, substance abuse, self-harm, and animal abuse.

Plot Summary

The Last House on Needless Street begins on the 11th anniversary of the disappearance of Lulu Walters, a six-year-old girl, who vanished on vacation at a lake in Washington. The anniversary hits Ted Bannerman hard; he had been a suspect, interviewed by the police and reporters. Ted, an avid lover of birds, discovers that someone placed glue traps on all of the bird feeders in his yard. Ted is forced to gather up all the birds and kill them to end their suffering. Ted is distraught by the death of the birds, and he begins a list of suspects. Ted records his thoughts. He’s afraid that if he does not record himself, he will disappear. Ted spends the day with his daughter, Lauren, who pedals around the house on her pink bicycle.

When Lauren goes away for the week, Ted’s cat, Olivia, comes out. Olivia and Lauren are never in the house at the same time. Olivia goes into her crate, a broken chest freezer with air holes drilled into it. Olivia is a black cat and proud of her appearance. She loves a tabby cat that she spies on through the peepholes in the plyboard that covers all the windows in the house. She is also religious, frequently turning to the Bible for answers to questions in her life. Ted rescued Olivia when she was a kitten. Ever since then, they have been connected by a golden cord, which only Olivia can see. Her duty is to take care of Ted. Olivia begins being plagued by a high-pitched noise.

Dee Walters moves into the empty house next door. Dee is the sister of Lulu, the missing girl. Dee is wracked by guilt over Lulu. On the day that Lulu disappeared, Dee had been annoyed with her. She left Lulu behind with her parents on the Lakeshore and met a boy on the beach. Dee’s period started, ruining the moment. She stepped into the water, but she soon found herself surrounded by snakes. She has had ophidiophobia ever since. When she returned to her parents, she found them in a state of panic: Lulu was missing. The last time they interacted, Lulu tried to show Dee a pretty pebble she found. Dee ignored her. Dee’s mother left her father, who died of a stroke, leaving Dee all alone in the world.

Dee tries to track Lulu’s kidnapper, but she has little luck. Detective Karen had helped her search, but after Dee confronted an innocent man in Oregon, Karen became more reticent. Dee manages to track Ted down thanks to a cruel rich man. She moves into the empty house next door to him. She introduces herself and even gets Ted to let her in under the pretense of using his bathroom.

Ted lives in the shadow of his deceased mother’s influence, sometimes feeling her presence even though she is long dead. He loses hours and even days at a time. He drinks to forget the present and the past. He visits a dubious psychologist, whom he calls the “bug man,” to try to help him deal with Lauren’s psychological conditions. Lauren is getting harder and harder to deal with. Ted asks the bug man circuitous and hypothetical questions. The bug man gives Ted pills and tries to get Ted to open up more. Around the same time, Olivia begins seeing a psychologist on a daytime television program. This psychologist appears preoccupied with the effects of childhood trauma on the psyche.

Ted is lonely, and he wants a female friend to help out with Lauren and Olivia. He goes on a series of failed dates with women he meets online. Dee uses one of these occasions to break into Ted’s house. She finds evidence of a little girl’s presence and becomes doubly convinced that Ted is hiding Lulu. She makes the mistake of refitting the plyboard over the kitchen window with new nails.

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.

Olivia hears Lauren’s voice coming from inside the freezer. Lauren can hear her and understand her. Lauren pleads with her that Ted has trapped her. Olivia struggles to open the freezer door to let Lauren out, but the freezer is empty. From within Olivia’s own mind, Lauren explains that Olivia came out of Lauren’s mind to protect her from systematic abuse that she suffered. Ted has trained Lauren to be unable to function while he plays a particular record, so it is up to Olivia to free them. Until Olivia can master the use of their unfamiliar human body, she has to act normal around Ted. She manages to throw a tape cassette containing a plea for help from Lauren out of the letterbox into the bushes outside. Dee sees the cassette tape fly into the bushes and retrieves it when Ted goes out.

At the bar, Ted saves the bug man from an altercation. They leave and drink outside of a gas station. The bug man wants to use Ted as a case study for a book; he thinks he can get rich from Ted’s story. Ted loses his temper and assaults the bug man before running off into the forest. He returns home and packs outdoors supplies, planning to go on the run.

Lauren and Olivia plan to use Ted’s knife to kill him, but the knife is missing. Ted takes them into the woods. Dee sees Ted leaving. Assuming Ted is taking Lulu away to kill her, Dee follows him, marking trees with neon paint to find her way back. She gets bitten by a rattlesnake.

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. Dee finds Ted, bleeding to death. 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. Lauren smothers Ted with her hands. Ted nearly dies, but Olivia integrates with Night-time (Ted’s most basic survival instinct), and their combined force of will keeps Ted’s heart beating.

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. Lulu followed Dee as she went off on her own and ran into the young man on the beach. They had gone to a secluded grove of trees. Dee sent Lulu to play in the water so she and the young man could kiss. Lulu fell off the rocks reaching for a pretty pebble and banged her head. Dee panicked, thinking Lulu was dead. She went to her in the water, but she was traumatized by snakes and fled. She returned, realizing Lulu might just be unconscious, but someone had taken Lulu’s body. Dee saw the abductor’s car driving away. Dee lied to herself, her family, and the police. She spent the rest of her life seeking revenge to assuage her own guilt, and Ted was the perfect scapegoat. Dee dies alone, far from any trails in the forest.

Ted’s neighbor, Rob, a park ranger, follows Dee’s paint trail into the woods, and his dog scents Ted’s blood. Rob saves Ted’s life. Ted recovers in the hospital, finally finding a friend in Rob. He and his other personalities open up to Rob.

Mrs. Bannerman, Ted’s mother, was horribly abusive to Ted as a child. She would cut him open, stitch him up, and douse him with boiling water and vinegar, locking him in the chest freezer. Ted’s mind created Lauren to help bear the physical pain and Olivia to help ease his emotional pain. He constructed an imaginary version of his house for him to retreat to. Lauren had to take on all of the pain his body experienced; she resented him for this. Mrs. Bannerman convinced Ted he was a monster when Night-time took over his body and he killed his homeroom’s pet mouse. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bannerman was fired from her nursing job at a local hospital for abusing patients, and she began abusing children at the kindergarten where she worked afterward. Lulu was her final victim. Fearing the police closing in on her, Mrs. Bannerman hid Lulu’s body in a neighbor’s cellar. She hanged herself and had Ted bury her and her prized possessions in the woods; these became Ted’s “gods.”

Rob takes Ted to the lake to pay respects to Lulu. Ted finds her pretty pebble on the path where Dee had dropped it years before. He falls, reopening his wound. For the first time in years, he can feel pain. The pain lets the personality of Little Teddy take over. Little Teddy witnessed their mother enter the neighbor’s house with a suitcase before she hanged herself. Thanks to this revelation, the police recover Lulu’s body and close the case.

At long last, Ted can begin to heal from his life of ordeals. He begins to get to know his other identities. Ted can move on with his life.