HORROR JAMES GRAINGER

The Last House on Needless Street Catriona Ward Nightfire, 340 pages, $37.99

Any novel even partially narrated by a house cat is bound to rattle readers at first. It helps that in “The Last House on Needless Street” the cat, Olivia, lives with a possible child murderer and his deranged daughter in a semiderelict house at the end of a lane. Luckily, Catriona Ward knows what she’s up to. For reasons that would only spoil its corkscrew-twisting finale, the novel is fractured into several points of view and time frames, artfully mirroring the mental states of the house’s occupants (yes, including Olivia). Those multiple viewpoints also help dramatize the horrors that lock the protagonists inside psychological prisons even more gloomy than the house of the title. And yet for all of its gloom and Gothic trappings, “The Last House on Needless Street” ultimately wins over the reader with its humane, insightful depiction of mental illness and grief.

My Heart Is a Chainsaw Stephen Graham Jones Saga Press, 410 pages, $35.99

You might have thought that Stephen Graham Jones was finished with the slasher genre after releasing not one but two novels (“The Only Good Indians” and “Night of the Mannequins”) that turned the familiar conventions of the 1980s horror staple inside out. You would be very wrong. Those works, it seems, were actually the opening acts for the headliner, “My Heart Is a Chainsaw,” the mother of all slasher novels. Jade Daniels is a 17year-old girl from the wrong side of the tracks who finds solace in slasher movies, so much so that she wishes that a Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger would visit her town and dispatch her high school’s popular kids. When that dream starts to come true, Jade discovers that life ain’t like it is in the movies. Like all of Jones’ work, the comic and pop-culture elements are seamlessly entwined within tragedies personal, historical and systemic. Jones is saying something profound about the importance and limitations of fandom, the wounds it papers over and the monsters it keeps at bay, at least for a little while.