Few people emerge into the world as monsters, fully formed. It seems to be a gradual journey, step by step, into monsterhood. You might not realize what direction you’re headed in until you turn around and see how far you’ve come along that dark road. Perhaps the most monstrous of the monsters don’t ever recognize themselves as such. This has always been one of my greatest fears—that I may, unknowingly, have become a monster. It’s a fear I put in all my books.
Writing monsters can be difficult. It’s a problem I struggled with during the early stages of The Last House on Needless Street. How do you conjure deeds and actions that are unthinkable, let alone unwritable? Writing monsters can be problematic in another way, too—good writing relies on empathy, conflict, on the reader being immersed in an imaginative and emotional world. Psychopathy in its most extreme forms lacks this depth, this rich interiority. Those who commit such acts commonly lack both affect and imagination. From an author’s and a readers’ point of view, living in their head and looking through their eyes can end up being an inert, a strangely arid experience.
One novel which helped guide me along the way was Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates, a dark tunnel of a book, a macabre contemporary gothic based on Jeffrey Dahmer. Young serial killer Quentin P. is trying to create zombies, so that his victims won’t leave him. It’s a strangely common motivation for serial killers—Dennis Nilsen is famously said to have killed ‘for company.’ In Zombie Oates finds a way to contain these dark acts, through eerie voice, and a heightened, visceral style, a structure as dependent on redaction and omission as it is on information.
Zombie is an indictment of American social and economic systems too—Quentin P. literally kills and consumes young black men. This is a kind of monstrosity that terrifies in a different way—the larger, impersonal systems that inflict cruelty and injustice en masse, with no regard to the individual.
Close to, examined in minute detail, almost anything can become monstrous. I wanted the first-person perspectives in The Last House on Needless Street to be so tightly fitted around their narrators that the reader should almost feel they are inside them—looking out from their eyes, living inside their skin. There is fear inherent in being plunged so deep into a narrative point of view. We look to fiction for plot, character development, resolution—the logic which life in its arbitrariness so distinctly lacks. When the reader is forced into the perspective of an unreliable narrator, that logic, that fictional security is no longer offered. We know only as much as the character does. We fumble forward in the dark, only ever given occasional glimpses of knowledge and light. There is no omniscient narrator to show us the way. It’s too like life for comfort.
Though The Last House on Needless Street is not based on any particular person or event, echoes of monstrous events that horrify me reverberate through the book. One of these is the Lake Sammamish murders committed by Ted Bundy.
In The Last House on Needless Street, children have been going missing from the lakeshore for years. None have ever been found. Dee’s little sister, Lulu, was one of the missing children, and Dee has been searching for her abductor ever since. She thinks she has found him. Ted Bannerman lives in a boarded-up house at the end of Needless Street with his daughter, Lauren, and his disapproving cat, Olivia. Lauren and Olivia don’t go outside. Needless Street ends in the wild, Olympic forest, and is only a short hike from the lake. Dee moves into the vacant house next door to Ted’s and begins her watch. She has to be sure it’s him. When Ted’s daughter Lauren goes missing, suspicion turns to terror.
There were thousands of people at Lake Sammamish, in Washington State on July 14th 1974, when Ted Bundy abducted two women from the crowded summer shores. He approached Janice Ott with his arm in a cast and a sling, asking for her help to move a sailboat. He drove a gold VW Bug. A few hours later, he used the same ruse to lure Denise Naslund away as she made her way to the restroom. He approached several other women that afternoon, always giving his name—Ted. Janice Ott and Denise Naslund were the fifth and sixth women to go missing in the area that year. They were not the last.
We are supposed to be safe in crowds, in numbers, surrounded by our families. We don’t expect the monstrous to pursue us out of the night, into the blazing light of a summer day. The Lake Sammamish murders were staggering in their greed and cruelty. These women died for their kindness, for wishing to assist what they thought was an injured stranger. As Denise Naslund’s mother told the Seattle Times, ‘she had the kind of helpful nature that would place her in danger.’
This day has always had a cold grip on my imagination. Ted Bannerman in The Last House on Needless Street is not Ted Bundy. But a sense of the grief and violent loss Bundy inflicted on victims and their families permeates the book, which is full of echoes of that summer day at the lake in 1974. The very setting seems to me an array of disturbing, arresting contrasts. The deep, cool woods of Washington, the burning light on the lake-water. Two women taken from the midst of a crowd, for lonely death. The wild Pacific Northwest forest, a disappearance at a lake—all these are artifacts of my fear of that hot summer day. And of course, my protagonist is named Ted. The name leaves an uneasy, dull thud in the narrative.
I think it’s safe to say that writers put part of themselves into each character they create. If there are monsters on Needless Street, I made them. In a way, what I most fear, becoming a monster, has already happened—has been happening ever since I first started writing. Over the years, I have incubated and walked in the shoes of many monsters—all those which live in the pages of my stories.
I have always been more preoccupied with human monsters than supernatural ones. Vampires, werewolves, evil spirits—it seems to me we that have created these ranks of otherworldly beings in order to have something to blame for those darker acts—the unspeakable desires that we cannot bear to ascribe to humanity. Because to allow that there are human beings who feel and do those things, who desire pain and bloodshed—well, that would be the most frightening acknowledgement of all. The supernatural is there to reassure us that humankind is not capable of such things.
We read and watch monsters to show ourselves what we are not, or what we hope we are not. We seek them out in fiction and in art to inoculate ourselves against fear, in the hope that on that unspecified future day when we look the monster in the eye, face to face, we will be prepared. But we also seek out these stories for their hope, for the affirmation that human nature is both stranger and more resilient than we could have dreamed. Perhaps we seek out stories with monsters in them in the hope that they will turn out to be survival stories in the end. And sometimes—just sometimes—they do.
