Catriona Ward was the first writer ever to win the August Derleth Award twice, and she did it before almost anyone outside the British horror scene had heard of her.
Rawblood took it in 2016 and Little Eve in 2019, and then The Last House on Needless Street arrived in 2021 with a Stephen King blurb calling it the buried treasure of the year, and she became the name everyone was recommending.
She grew up in the United States, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen and Morocco, which is an unusual biography for a writer of very English gothic novels and shows up in the way her settings are observed from slightly outside.
What the Catriona Ward books do structurally is the thing to know before you start. Almost every one of them withholds something fundamental about who is narrating or what is happening, and the withholding is never a twist bolted on at the end. It’s load-bearing, it changes the meaning of everything that came before it, and the books are built to be reread rather than solved.
Which means going in blind matters more with her than with almost anyone, and this page is written to preserve that.
I haven’t read these. What follows is the critical consensus.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Short Version
Read The Last House on Needless Street, and read nothing about it first.
Then Sundial if the structural games worked on you, or Little Eve if you want the best-written one.
The Novels
The Last House on Needless Street (2021)
The house sits boarded up where a Washington road dead-ends against the woods.
Inside lives Ted, windows nailed over, with a daughter he says is visiting, a Bible, and a cat called Olivia who narrates her own chapters and reads scripture. The neighbors keep an eye on him. Years back, the police brought him in over a girl gone missing at a lake, and nothing stuck. Now Dee has taken a house nearby, because that girl was her sister.
Describing it usefully means ruining it, and every summary out there has wrecked it for somebody.
What’s safe to say is that the first fifty pages are deliberately hard to follow, that everything confusing about them resolves completely, and that the resolution isn’t a trick played on you but the very thing the book exists to do.
Go in knowing nothing. Do not read reviews and do not let anybody tell you what the cat is about.
Ward has won the August Derleth Award three times, which nobody else has managed.
Also on haunted house books and serial killer books.
Little Eve (2018)
A remote island off the Scottish coast, 1921. A family living in a ruined castle under a man called Uncle, who has convinced them that the world is ending and that they are to be its inheritors.
On the morning of the first of January somebody kills almost all of them and arranges the bodies in a ring around the well.
Two survivors. Dinah, who is found and gives evidence. And Eve, who is accused.
The structure alternates between 1921 and the trial, and between Eve’s account and Dinah’s, and the two cannot both be true. Ward is doing the same thing she does everywhere, which is to withhold not the killer but the category of story you are in.
The cult material is exact about how coercion works on children who have no comparison, and Uncle is one of the more convincing figures of that kind in recent fiction.
It won the August Derleth Award, making her the first writer to win it twice, and it is her best-written book.
Also on folk horror.
The Girl From Rawblood (2015)
Her first novel, published in 2015, and it won the August Derleth Award, which almost never happens to a debut.
Iris Villarca is eleven and the last of a family that has been dying at Rawblood, their house on Dartmoor, for generations. The family believe they carry a hereditary disease that kills anybody who stays there and anybody who loves them, so the rule is that Villarcas live alone and never marry.
The structure runs across a century and a half in fragments: Iris in 1910, her father’s Italian childhood, a vivisectionist’s laboratory notebook from the 1880s, a soldier’s account from the Great War, and a first-person voice that is not identified for a long time.
The medical material is the most disturbing part and it is drawn from the actual history of Victorian experimental physiology.
What the family disease actually is arrives very late and it is worth the assembly.
Also on gothic fiction.
Sundial (2022)
Rob lives in a comfortable California suburb with a husband who is unfaithful and two daughters, the elder of whom she has begun to be frightened of.
So she takes Callie to Sundial, the desert compound in the Mojave where Rob grew up, to talk to her.
The compound is the book. Rob’s parents were researchers running a behavioral study on dogs, and Rob and her sister Jack were raised inside it, and what was actually being studied is disclosed slowly and is worse than the reader assumes.
Ward alternates between Rob’s account in the desert and Callie’s at home in the present, and the two do not agree about basic facts, including how many children there are.
The dog material is genuinely upsetting and the ending is her bleakest.
The general read is that it’s the weaker of her two American-set novels, and also that the desert sections rank among the best writing she has done.
Looking Glass Sound (2023)
Wilder Harlow spends a childhood summer in a cottage in coastal Maine with two friends, one of whom takes a photograph of him that he does not remember being taken, and a man is drowning women in the town.
Decades later he tries to write about it, and his friend Sky steals the manuscript and publishes it first, and Wilder writes a second book about that.
The structure is the most ambitious thing she has attempted. The novel contains its own drafts, its own theft, the response to the theft, and eventually text that is aware it is being read, and the layers do not resolve into a stable account.
Some readers come out of the last third exhilarated, and some come out feeling cheated, and honestly, both responses are reasonable.
The Maine material and the childhood friendship are excellent throughout, and the horror in the first half is entirely conventional and very well done.
Her most divisive book.
Where to Start
Read The Last House on Needless Street, having read nothing about it, and stay with it past the point where the opening act tries to shake you off.
If it works, read Little Eve next, which is the better prose and the smaller book.
Sundial if you want to be upset. Rawblood if you want to work.
And approach the Catriona Ward books generally expecting to be withheld from, because that is the method rather than a trick, and the ones that frustrate you on a first read tend to open up on a second.
The canon it belongs to is on my horror classics page. The house novels she keeps dismantling are on my haunted house books list.
