I love fall, but I think it’s also less that I love fall and more that I love the season change. There is the feeling of understanding that something is coming and then there is the day you wake up and know that it has happened. It’s like rearranging the furniture in a room, and suddenly the view is a little different and the light is a little different and the path through is a little different. That’s what I like.
But also I love fall. I’m not sure I believe in other worlds, but I do feel the thinning of the veil. The sounds—jangling keys, trains, church bells, screams—seem crisper. The town I live in shrinks as the weekenders thin out, and the leaves take over like an alien species. My feelings always seem like they’re right there under my skin, so close to the surface, like I can touch them. It makes me feel more animal, alive in my body, and less like a floating head with a checking account. Fall is when I cry and make promises to myself and settle into big projects and listen to music I liked as a teenager and travel solo and it’s when I read the most and it’s when I’m the most alone with myself and the world.
I’m a scorpio, in other words. Born on the cusp and ready to be! intense! about it!
So fuck it, let’s be intense together. I read a book a while ago in digital galley form that is now making its way around the bookstore after I cajoled the store buyer into getting a few for the stacks. It moves comfortably along the thriller-to-horror spectrum, weird and wild and anxious and heart racing. Welcome to Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street.
We start off with Ted Bannerman, who lives alone in a boarded up house at the end of the road. His only companion is his cat, Olivia, who spends her time reading and quoting bible passages and knocking things off tables. His daughter Lauren visits every now and then, but it’s always deeply weird when she does.
And already, you know something is wrong. You can feel it. Remember, the veil is thin, but there is still a veil.
A woman named Dee moves in to the house next door, and she is on a mission. Her sister was kidnapped years ago and she’s here to find her, and Ted doesn’t like this. He feel surveilled, scrutinized, the oddness of his life coming into sharp relief as someone witnesses it.
Because Dee thinks that Ted kidnapped her sister.
Standard thriller shit, right?
You keep going and things spiral: gods buried in the woods. The cat—one of the narrators—wants a TV show. A girl who can’t leave again, not after last time, her anger growing like a tumor. Memories of Ted’s mother, and the day she told him she doesn’t love him. Red birds that visit Dee in her head as her insomnia and paranoia intensify. A therapist called the bug man from whom we are hiding. Everything is dark and dilapidated and off-balance and upsetting.
I’m astonished at the construction of this novel. The cat passages sound like a cat is talking, like the cat is walking across your brain with “little heavy velvet feet.” In places the prose is laugh-out-loud funny in a way that makes you feel slightly cracked open, like there’s light where there shouldn’t be light. At other places it’s a gut-punch. Here’s a passage a friend who’s reading it sent me that made me remember how much I loved the sentences:
The twist has been done, and there has been some criticism in that regard. But a book is more than its twist, and I think Ward takes her responsibility here seriously. She’s written something I’ve never read before, something I loved. I thought I knew a dozen different times where it was going, as though the knowing was right there under my skin, a feeling ready to make itself known. But I was wrong every time, and you will be too.
A perfect October book.
Purchase a copy of The Last House on Needless Street at this link, which supports my favorite bookstore in Kingston: Rough Draft Bar & Books.
Drinking: Here is a fall cocktail for you, that I will rip straight from the latest Old Wives subscriber zine. into a shaker with ice: 4oz apple cider, 2oz mezcal, .5oz orange liqueur (dry Curaçao is great, but one time i was out and used some pineapple juice i had in the fridge and that was great), and the juice of half a lime or more to taste. Easily up-scalable for parties! Just put some ice in the pitcher, stir like mad, and let it melt.
Internet: are you following the guy photoshopping Paddington into every movie until he forgets, because those images are the only joy I feel
Cooking: Nigella’s Guinness cake
On repeat: Don’t Go Putting Wishes in My Head / TORRES
Reading: I always listen to The Caretaker’s An Empty Bliss (which, to quote the first comment on this YouTube video, “is what being the last person on earth would feel like) around this time of year, and this essay about it? W H E W
News: Our scrappy little podcast is being shopped as an animated series in Canada which fucking rules. Check out the amazing art and also hey listen to an episode why not.