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thestoryprofessor 's review for:
The Last House on Needless Street
by Catriona Ward
This is a beautifully written story with unique characters and an intriguing world… and it is all almost entirely overshadowed by a woefully cliche plot twist that seems to dig itself deeper into its overused grave from the moment the first part of it is revealed.
It seems that horror writers use cliche multiple personalities plots like Marvel movies use multiple dimensions: cheap, lazy ways of writing whatever wackadoodle story they want without having to intelligently or creatively think through the real consequences such wackadoodleness would genuinely reap. It is made worse when the plot twist of this story is actually a bunch of mini plot twists that revealed more personalities or memories conveniently tucked behind plot contrivances. This story seriously gives us mini plot twists behind different uses of either “but then it turns out this character is actually a personality” or “and then he suddenly remembered”. It reads like that one kid in elementary who would makeup new rules for recess games so he could do whatever he wanted.
It’s frustrating especially when there was so much promise and intrigue to this story and its characters. All of the narrators were incredibly interesting characters, and my interest in the story was because we were following them, not to untangle a messy plot that is taken away from the reader anyway only to be given the mentally ill equivalent of “it was all just a dream”.
It seems that horror writers use cliche multiple personalities plots like Marvel movies use multiple dimensions: cheap, lazy ways of writing whatever wackadoodle story they want without having to intelligently or creatively think through the real consequences such wackadoodleness would genuinely reap. It is made worse when the plot twist of this story is actually a bunch of mini plot twists that revealed more personalities or memories conveniently tucked behind plot contrivances. This story seriously gives us mini plot twists behind different uses of either “but then it turns out this character is actually a personality” or “and then he suddenly remembered”. It reads like that one kid in elementary who would makeup new rules for recess games so he could do whatever he wanted.
It’s frustrating especially when there was so much promise and intrigue to this story and its characters. All of the narrators were incredibly interesting characters, and my interest in the story was because we were following them, not to untangle a messy plot that is taken away from the reader anyway only to be given the mentally ill equivalent of “it was all just a dream”.