What A Horror Story Can Teach Us About Survival
Spoiler warning: This post discusses major plot points from the book.
When I picked up The Last House on Needless Street, I was expecting a horror novel — something eerie and atmospheric to satisfy my October reading list. What I found instead was something much deeper: a story about survival wearing the mask of horror. Catriona Ward herself said that this is a book about enduring the unendurable and by the end I couldn’t agree more.
The story follows Ted, his daughter Lauren, and a neighboring woman searching for her missing sister. Slowly, the book peels back its own layers until the real story emerges: Ted lives with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), and many of the “other characters” are in fact his alters. Rather than a twist for shock value, this reveal reframes the entire narrative as a portrait of a nervous system doing whatever it must to keep a person alive.
“Some people break the world to survive. Others break themselves instead.”
DID is so often sensationalized in media, but this book treats it with compassion. It shows the disorder not as something dangerous or extreme, but as a brilliant and necessary psychological adaptation. Ted didn’t fragment because he was weak; he fragmented because that’s what allowed him to stay here.
As a therapist, this resonates with how I view coping more broadly. Many behaviors that appear “maladaptive” from the outside are actually ingenious survival strategies. Internal Family Systems (IFS) frames these parts of us as protectors; trauma reorganizes the psyche in the direction of protection, not pathology. I am not an IFS therapist by modality, but I deeply align with its stance that every internal part is there for a reason — often born from pain, but in service of survival. Without the alters, Ted would have been crushed by his circumstances. Without our own emotional “parts,” many of us would be too.
The novel doesn’t ask us to fear the fractured mind. It asks us to witness it. And in doing so, it reminds us that the goal of healing is not to eliminate the adaptations that kept us alive, but to thank them for what they made possible.
