The Last House on Needless Street

Olivia, a beautiful black cat, is one of the narrators of The Last House on Needless Street. Olivia cares deeply for Ted; she describes their bond as a cord of light that connects their hearts. This is not figurative: Olivia can see this connection when they are together. Like Ted, Olivia is an unreliable narrator. Her point-of-view is limited by the fact that she is a cat and that she is not able to leave the house, meaning her worldview and perceptions of reality are limited to the interior of the house, her short time with her mother, and the view she has from a small peephole in the house’s plyboard-covered windows. Her descriptions of the outside world are informed by the sensory perceptions available to her as a cat, some of which are beyond the scope of human senses. For example, much of the outside world is available to her only through smell and sound. She refers to dogs as “brouhaha’s,” for example, having no vocabulary to describe them; instead, she experiences the danger that dogs present to her through their barking and their smell.

The first big twist in the novel has Lauren contact Olivia, demonstrating that Olivia is a projection of Lauren’s mind, created through dissociation from the horrific abuse she is subject to. The high-pitched sound Olivia hears throughout the novel is Lauren/Olivia scratching at the metal walls of the chest freezer where Ted locks Lauren. Olivia has to save them both, but she is unable to fully control Lauren’s body. When she manages to stab Ted in the stomach, it is revealed that Olivia is also one of Ted’s many personalities. Ted’s mind created Olivia as a coping mechanism for his mother’s horrific abuse; Olivia helped support Ted emotionally. Ted always wanted a cat, but his mother always denied him this comfort. Ted named a souvenir wooden cat keyring Olivia; his mother forced him to abandon it in the woods to teach him about loss. Olivia manages to protect Ted one final time and saves his life by merging with another personality, Night-time, to become Night Olivia. Neither Olivia nor Night-time exist at the end of the novel, but Night Olivia lives on to coexist with Ted, Lauren, and the other personalities.

Delilah “Dee” Walters is the older sister of Lulu Walters, the girl who went missing 11 years ago. Dee’s chapters are narrated by a third-person limited narrator; on the surface, this is a more reliable form of narration than in Ted’s or Olivia’s chapters—but all is not as it seems with Dee. Dee once held hopes of attending Pacific Ballet School before Lulu disappeared. Dee’s family, and her hopes for the future, fall apart after authorities fail to find Lulu. For most of the novel, it appears that Dee carries a great deal of survivor’s guilt and trauma over Lulu’s disappearance. She is haunted by her annoyance with Lulu the final time they saw each other, when Lulu offered her a pretty pebble she found, and Dee ignored her. Lulu’s body was never recovered, robbing Dee of any sense of closure. She hunts for Lulu’s kidnapper. She is haunted by ophidiophobia she developed from encountering rattlesnakes in the lake on that fateful day, and her nightmares are plagued by red birds weaving their nests with strands of Lulu’s hair. Snakes have biblical connections as the root of evil, and Dee’s simultaneous fear of and fascination with snakes represent her inability to forgive herself and move on; she is consumed by her guilt and desire for revenge.

Dee initially appears to be the hero of the novel because circumstances make Ted look like a serial killer and kidnapper. However, this evidence is skewed by Dee’s bias and by the unreliable narration of Ted’s, Olivia’s, and Lauren’s chapters. One of the major twists of the novel reveals that her search for her sister’s killer is a misguided means of alleviating her guilt for her responsibility in her sister’s disappearance. On the day Lulu disappears, Lulu actually tags along with Dee when Dee goes off with a teenage boy at the lake. While Dee and the boy kiss in secret, Lulu falls off the rocks by the lakeshore while reaching for a pretty, green pebble, hitting her head on the rocks. Dee panics and leaves her sister, unconscious and dying, before rushing back, only to find that someone else has taken Lulu. Dee needs Ted to be guilty in order to relieve her conscience. Dee is bitten by a rattlesnake and dies without knowing the truth about Ted’s innocence, without satisfaction from achieving her goal of revenge.

Ted calls Lauren his daughter. She is a preteen and is becoming a problem for Ted due to her increasingly violent behavior. Evidence initially suggests that Lauren is Lulu Walters. Lauren spends weekends with Ted, then goes away for periods of time. It is unclear where Lauren goes, or where Ted puts her, until Lauren reveals to Olivia that he locks her in the chest freezer. Lauren initially tells Olivia that the cat is a projection of her own mind; they share the same body, and Olivia only thinks she is a cat. However, Lauren says this to manipulate Olivia into trying to kill Ted—something that Lauren has tried and failed to do for years. Ted conditions her using pain, making her helpless while a certain record plays.

Lauren sometimes finds an opportunity to take over Ted’s body. In the past, she has used these opportunities to hurt Ted, or to send out messages into the world crying for help. Because Lauren emerged from Ted’s mind to help take on the burden of the pain their mother inflicts upon them, Ted finds he is able to control when she takes over the body, locking her out of his interior consciousness to suffer alone while he plays with Olivia and Night-time. Lauren resents the other personalities for this. Lauren believes life is cruel and constructed from pain, causing her self-destructive desire to end her captivity, even if it means ending her own life. Ultimately, Lauren views Ted as a victim too, even if he has been cruel to her. She does not think Ted is a monster, but she does think he is better off dead than living as he has been.

Mrs. Bannerman is Ted’s mother. Though she died 11 years prior to the story, she is an omnipresent figure in Ted’s life. Ted loves her dearly, but she does not love him back. Projecting her own need to harm others onto him, she views Ted as a burden and a responsibility. Mrs. Bannerman appears in flashbacks and slippages in time, metaphorically haunting Ted’s day-to-day life. Mrs. Bannerman is associated with the color blue: the blue rug that Ted hates, and her dresses made of blue organza, which Ted loves. Mrs. Bannerman was beautiful and, to all outward appearances, a classy, upstanding woman. She emphasized dignity above all else. Ted sees her in some ways as an ideal woman, shown by the fact that he tries to get his internet dates to wear blue dresses. However, events in the novel reveal this unhealthy attachment to be more worshipful than oedipal.

Mrs. Bannerman came from Locronan, a small village in the Breton region of France. This village had an intimate connection with death. In Locronan, they believed in the Ankou, a death god or spirit, which could change its face, ultimately settling on the face of a person when they die. Mrs. Bannerman instilled her belief in the Ankou in Ted, though he does not fully understand the concept. Mrs. Bannerman believes the urge to harm others runs in their family because she had the same experiences with her father. She urges Ted to conceal what she calls his “true nature.” This effectively ruins Ted’s life. Mrs. Bannerman, it turns out, projected her own nature onto her son, treating him as a monster, even as she abused Ted and other children. Mrs. Bannerman is responsible for the death of many children, including Lulu; Pemoc’h, a young boy from her home village; and six or more boys from by the lake. She preyed primarily on boys like Pemoc’h—boys who had no family to look for them. She never hurt girls; kidnapping Lulu was a mistake due to her “boyish” haircut. Because of this mistake, Lulu was Mrs. Bannerman’s last victim. She hid her body deep in the cellar of her friend and neighbor Linda’s house, then hanged herself, charging Ted with burying her body and her prized possessions (including her blue organza dress and her surgical kit) in the forest, where they would become “gods” to Ted due to the power he gave them over his life. Ted later resolves to try to forget these relics of his mother, diminishing any further sway she could have over his life.

The bug man is a disgraced psychiatrist whom Ted meets through the classified ads. Ted refers to him as “the bug man” because he reminds Ted of some kind of kind beetle. Ted goes to weekly therapy sessions with the bug man in order to procure the pills that make his condition easier to handle and to probe for advice about how to handle Lauren. Ted thinks he is being clever with the bug man, hiding his real intentions behind boring details of his life or the plot of fake television shows. The bug man sees right through Ted, and he views him as an opportunity to make it big in the realm of psychology. His research focuses on dissociative identity disorder, and he wants to use Ted as a case study to prove his theories about the condition. Ted incidentally saves the bug man from a fight in a bar bathroom; a drunk man was convinced the bug man stole his cufflinks. Ted and the bug man drink together, and the psychiatrist admits he had been following Ted for a while.

The bug man’s fate is unclear at the end of the novel. When Ted discovers his treachery, he crushes the bug man in a bear hug, seemingly feeling his ribs break, but Ted does not think he killed him. It is unclear what happened to the bug man; his office is cleared out when Ted goes to check on it. The reader could misinterpret the bug man as one of Ted’s personalities; however, because Ted is able to interact with the bug man in the bar, and because the bug man interacts with another person at the bar, the reader can deduce he was actually a disgraced psychiatrist looking for a manipulable client he can use to gain back notoriety and wealth. Similar to Mrs. Bannerman’s position as a nurse and kindergarten teacher, the bug man represents how vulnerable adults with psychiatric disorders can be to people in positions of power, illustrating that even roles that are meant to help others can be used to inflict harm.

Olivia experiences Ted’s visits with the bug man as a daytime television psychology show. Something in this personality is aware that the bug man’s intentions may not be right, but there is little Olivia can do to protect Ted. She can only comfort him and try to alert him due to her extreme discomfort in her awareness of him.