What’s the book? The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig
How dark is it? Not too gory but kind of existentially dark
How good is it? I give it 6/10 decaying fish
This book was pretty surreal. I saw it on a display and thought, “yeah, I remember pictures of woodland staircases going around the internet a while back. Makes sense they would inspire a horror story.” This book was, indeed, inspired by those pictures.
Mostly, this book is devoted to the kind of otherworldly house those stairs might lead to.
Way back in high school, Owen and his friends hiked out to a local camping spot to get wrecked in peace and anjoy the wonders of nature. On the way they discovered this random staircase that had never been there before. Just a staircase, all by itself, with no sign of a house around it. That was weird and terrifying, so they ignored the hell out of it and hiked on. But they were high schoolers so eventually drama happened and one of them decided to climb it. Matty, the most popular and well-adjusted of the friends, wanted everyone to climb the staircase with him but no one else was into it. They were all fighting with each other or too high to understand the request or dealing with their own shit. When everyone refused to join him, Matty climbed the ladder by himself and when he got to the top he just . . . vanished.
All his friends had to go home and just live with that confusion, as well as the suspicion of the whole town because there was no trace of Matty and no convincing explanation of his disappearance. Because the staircase vanished, too. The remaining friends, Owen, Lore (known as Lauren back in high school), Nick, and Hamish try to move on with their lives and . . . it doesn’t go that well. Owen and Nick are largely consumed by various mental health issues and Lore and Hamish, while outwardly successful, are emotionally far from okay. They spend decades like this, ignoring each other and nursing their various wounds, until Nick finds another staircase and convinces everyone to climb it. For Matty. This time they all vanish.
At the top of the stairs is a nightmare realm, literally. They’re trapped in a house where room after room is the scene of decay and tragedy; some rooms are the scenes of murders or suicides, some are the scenes of low points in the friends’ own lives. This dreamworld isn’t out to kill them, exactly, but it’s definitely trying to beat them down until they maybe kill themselves or each other in despair. It’s definitely trying to catch each one alone and vulnerable.
Most of the book takes place in this nightmare series of rooms, which makes it kind of a surreal book that runs on dream logic. While there’s plenty of gore and tragedy to be seen in the rooms, we’re really here for the emotional journey each character is taking as they attempt to rescue themselves and each other. We learn about each of the friends and the various pains they carry, both secret and not so secret. They’re all interesting and relatable enough that I was invested in their journey and whether they (and their friendships) survived this ordeal. It felt a little “after school special” in parts, trying too hard to teach me emotional lessons, but I do have a sappy side so I still enjoyed the book overall.
When I was little I was really weirded out by stories that ran on dream logic; Alice in Wonderland freaked me right out more than anything actually meant to scare me. I’m way more tough and grown up now but dream logic still sucks me in pretty well, disorienting me in a way that makes the horror scenes much more effective. The book starts to lose me near the end as the dream logic devolves into a backstory that doesn’t make a lot of sense but by then I really did care about the characters and whether they’d make it out alive (and of sound mind). I don’t know that I’m itching to read Wendig’s entire oeuvre but I didn’t hate this.
Darker Books 