The Only One Left

“My nightgown, stained red. My hands, warm and sticky with blood. The knife, still in my grip. […] Inside, my sister screamed. Horrified cries that rose and fell like a siren. The kind of screams you hear when something absolutely terrible has happened. Which it had. I looked down at the knife, still clenched in my hand and now clean as a whistle. […] As my sister continued to scream, I left the terrace and went to the garage to fetch some rope. That’s my memory— […] But that’s not what you’re most curious about, is it? You want to know if I’m as evil as everyone says I am. The answer is no. And yes.”

The Only One Left opens with this ominous introduction to a memoir, which is reproduced throughout the novel in Interludes distinguished by their typewriter font. It is written by someone present on the night of October 29, 1929, when three members of the Hope Family were killed. After five decades, this typist is prepared to reveal what really happened, but her reader—the person she addresses as “you” in the typewritten pages—is skeptical about the typist’s commitment to the truth. The interplay between writer and reader introduces the idea of the unreliable narrator, a key technique of the Gothic fiction genre and one that reminds readers that not everything is as it seems.

“I move on, although not before taking one last look at Lenora’s portrait. Three others, identical in shape and size, hang in a row next to it, all hidden behind black silk crepe. Rather than draped over the paintings, the fabric is stretched taut and held in place by nails driven directly into the frames. All that effort, though, doesn’t entirely hide the portraits. I can faintly see them behind the sheer crepe, hazy and featureless, like ghosts. Winston, Evangeline, and Virginia Hope. And Lenora’s the only one still on display because she’s the only one left.”

Kit McDeere’s introduction to the grand estate at Hope’s End is a chance to peer inside a world she has been aware of since childhood from the outside. She’s heard about the Hopes through the ghoulish nursery rhyme about Lenora murdering her parents and sister, and she’s been indoctrinated to mistrust and resent the wealthy by her bitter father Patrick. Now, Kit encounters the people behind these stereotypes for the first time: The portraits of Winston, Evangeline, and their daughter have been covered so that the household will not be reminded of