A review by emwgrace
The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

dark mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Trigger/Content Warning for the novel: Extremely Graphic Depictions of Child Abuse

Overhyped and ultimately disappointing. 

I’ve been meaning to read more mystery/thrillers, so I was excited to start this one. At the beginning, I was truly intrigued by both the missing girl case and the main character, Ted, and of course, any book that features a cat will get a special Cat Bonus Star from me. But around the halfway point, something about this made it so slow to get through, and instead of being the page-turner it should have been, I found myself more often just setting it down. This novel also made me uncomfortable (not in a good way) with how it handled certain topics, and because of that, any positive experiences I had while reading have been tainted. 


**Spoilers for the rest of the review**

Nothing ruins a book faster for me than using mental disorders as plot twists. It’s cheap and in almost all cases, poorly done. Yes, I read the author’s Afterword about the research she did and her intentions to destigmatize how DID is treated in media. But after finishing it, I can’t help but feel that the way this condition was handled in this book fed exactly into that stigma. While it was obvious for anyone who’s somewhat familiar with the genre to tell quite early on that Ted was not the culprit—that would have been too easy—the story still points all of its fingers at him from the beginning and spends more than 80% of the narrative treating him like an abusive monster who kidnapped a girl and locks her in a freezer. Revealing at the end of a novel, marketed as horror, that the character who’s been villainized by other characters and treated as an outcast to be feared for nearly the entire book has DID from abuse he experienced as a child, in my opinion, is not revolutionary. You can’t subvert the way mental illness is depicted in fiction if you spend almost 300 pages reproducing the same harmful portrayals you’re trying to subvert.
I know not everyone will agree, but I also know I’m not alone in my views.

In the end, the book wasn't scary, it was just sad and made me feel kinda gross. 
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