Dee’s period started, ruining the moment. She left Lulu behind with her parents on the Lakeshore and met a boy on the beach. On the day that Lulu disappeared, Dee had been annoyed with her. Dee is the sister of Lulu, the missing girl. Olivia begins being plagued by a high-pitched noise.ĭee Walters moves into the empty house next door. Ever since then, they have been connected by a golden cord, which only Olivia can see. Ted rescued Olivia when she was a kitten. She is also religious, frequently turning to the Bible for answers to questions in her life. She loves a tabby cat that she spies on through the peepholes in the plyboard that covers all the windows in the house. Olivia is a black cat and proud of her appearance. Olivia goes into her crate, a broken chest freezer with air holes drilled into it. Olivia and Lauren are never in the house at the same time. When Lauren goes away for the week, Ted’s cat, Olivia, comes out. Ted spends the day with his daughter, Lauren, who pedals around the house on her pink bicycle. He’s afraid that if he does not record himself, he will disappear. Ted is distraught by the death of the birds, and he begins a list of suspects. Ted is forced to gather up all the birds and kill them to end their suffering. Ted, an avid lover of birds, discovers that someone placed glue traps on all of the bird feeders in his yard. The anniversary hits Ted Bannerman hard he had been a suspect, interviewed by the police and reporters. 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. This guide follows the 2021 Nightfire paperback edition.Ĭontent Warning: This guide contains references to graphic child abuse, death by suicide, substance abuse, self-harm, and animal abuse. 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. Ted, meanwhile, struggles with balancing self-care with raising his daughter, Lauren, and his God-fearing cat, Olivia. Circumstantial events lead Dee to believe that Ted is responsible for her sister’s disappearance, bringing her to Needless Street to seek revenge. 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. Ward is American by birth, but studied in England and is a British national. 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. 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.

The last house on needless