The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

The Last House on Needless Street 

By Catriona Ward 

Rating : 4/5 

Genres : Horror, Mental Illness, 2022-read,Psychological Fiction, Multiple Personality Disorder. 

Here comes one of the books that's not over rated at all in this genre of fiction. I guess I was 25 percent into the plot and the time was 12 AM and decided to turn in for the night. Fifteen minutes later, I got up and resumed from where I left off  realizing that the plot got deep under my skin. I got hooked to the sensation of peeling off layers of the story and having a different taste with each bite. The plot gets curvaceous and twisted with depth and at the end once everything is figured out and all the bones are laid bare, it seems too simple. I was able to unlock some of the mystery but not all of it. And the author really plays with the imagination and judgements of the reader by playing with her words and writing style .. putting and framing an innocent victim into the role of a suspect/culprit. While keeping the actual murderer in the dark surrounded by an invisible halo. 

The central theme to the plot is a man who is not just one person but multiple and how he got to be that way ? And how the truth about him comes out and what happens after that?

 

A kid who has been an abuse victim at the hands of his deranged and lunatic mother develops multiple personality disorder(also called dissociative identity disorder) in order to cope with intensity of his trauma. Perhaps that is all he has done wrong in his life .. being soft, vulnerable and really touchy,feely. It is shocking how he almost lost everything he has and his own life (at the hands of one of his own alters) before they receive external help and things start getting better. I am amazed with the new knowledge I gained from this book at how this condition works in a person suffering from it. One body having multiple personalities or like souls .. is it really possible? When one of them is dealing with things, all the others are in total blank state mode .. when one is associated with physical sensations, another is with mental and olfactory etc etc .. its both very revealing and also shocking .. one alter tries to protect an other while another tries to get them all killed to escape their state of misery for ever. 

So the motives of the mother for hurting her own child are rooted in her family history which featured many a insane personality. While telling her son that something is wrong with him and that he needed to hide it from the world, she was having her own schema for doing things in the dark. Things she did and thoughts she hid from everyone..excepting her baby boy who suspected from the start that something is wrong with "Mommy" who is very beautiful and exceedingly sweet. 

This book gives hope to some such silent sufferers that there is hope for them too at the end and all is not lost .. they either learn to cope with all their alters and live in peace or unite all the different aspects into one final whole and get rid of the multitude.  

Liked the book very much. Just thought it had some unnecessary twists where Lulu was killed before her abduction etc .. and why should her sister also die after years of searching for answers I didn't understand. For the most part, this is very "unputdownable" book that i liked a lot. 💜One of the best in the genre of psychological fiction for sure. ✋