prisoner of night and fog by anne blankman

The book’s narrative counts on its readers to feel as though they know what’s happening, that they’ve already guessed the twists ahead of them. “To play with the expectations of horror… but also with the snap conclusions people might come to about certain kinds of behavior or mental health conditions. The book embraces many of the most familiar aspects of the horror genre, but it also counts on its readers to possess a shared understanding of its common tropes and signifiers, and uses those assumptions to subvert many of their preexisting expectations. I think what I wanted to do with this was destabilize that a little bit.” I think it’s unnerving to the reader because fiction is supposed to be more organized than that.

To me, that unreliability is incredibly lifelike, but I think it’s unnerving to people. “Your perceptions change every instant and quite often no two people remember the same event the same way. You don’t get to know everything about everyone. “First person narrators for me are a much more realistic way of presenting the world than an omniscient, Godlike creator. Children have been going missing at a nearby lake for some time and a woman named Dee, whose sister disappeared there some years prior, has convinced herself that Ted had something to do with it. In the most basic sense, The Last House on Needless Street follows the story of Ted, a lonely man who lives in a boarded up house (on Needless Street, naturally) with his 12 year old daughter, Lauren, and his cat, Olivia. It’s safe to say that she has achieved that goal. Ward refers to her previous novels as Gothic-style stories of “distressed girls wandering about on moors,” and says that part of her drive to write Needless Street came from an “urge to do something completely different” and to “write something as mad as I liked.” I felt that this was just perhaps pushing the envelope a little bit further.” I think that’s something that horror and the darker side of fiction do very naturally anyway.

“There are all these oppositions in place. The reader plays detective the whole time trying to piece together what is reliable and what is not,” Ward says.

“One of my great loves is the Gothic, the fragmented narrative.

Prisoner of night and fog by anne blankman