The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig
Publication Date: April 29, 2025 | Del Rey | 400 pages
In 1998, a group of high school friends enter the woods of Bucks County, PA to go camping... or, as teenagers are more apt to do, go "camping," which is to say they went into the woods to fuck and get fucked up. But in the midst of all their drugs and booze revelry, they stumble across the peculiar sight of a staircase in the woods. Just a staircase. There's no accompanying house, or the remains of a house that was, to indicate some perfectly normal reason for this staircase to be there. It's weird. So, of course, one of the teens climbs up the steps and... disappears. He didn't fall off the other side or pull some fancy sleight of hand to prank his friends and jump scare them in the woods. No, what he does is just completely vanish right off the face of the earth. Gone gone.
In the present day, the remaining friends, now long-since disconnected and grown apart, are reunited by a new tragedy coupled with the discovery of another strange staircase in the woods. This staircase is an opportunity for them to find out what happened to Matty, to find out if he's even still alive off in somewhere else, and maybe to save him, to put right what all fell apart so many years ago. And up they all go, up, up, and away, right on into hell.
The Staircase in the Woods is an unremittingly dark exploration of liminal spaces, fractured friendships, and the inner lives of this group of people that used to be friends but who have grown into almost-but-not quite strangers. In some ways, it's a haunted house story, but author Chuck Wendig does a marvelous job of inverting familiar tropes to give us something fresh, interesting, and next-level with its exploration of game mechanics and simulated reality philosophizing.
Mostly, though, it's a haunted people story. Theirs are stories about being lost, of being abandoned, of what it's like to be hollowed out and filled with darkness. The characters -- Nick, Owen, Lore (short for Lauren), and Hamish -- are all bleak figures with scarred childhoods, the better in which to mine for misery. There's deceit, depravity, suicidal ideation, self-harm, drug and alcohol abuse, addiction, child sex abuse, animal abuse, parental neglect, murder -- you name it, it's probably in here to some degree.
And that's not even getting into the pure, distilled scenes of nightmare fuel surrounding such heady topics. Did I mention this book is dark? The Staircase in the Woods may be the bleakest and darkest work Wendig has created thus far, skating up to the edges of, yet skirting around (but not necessarily away from), abject nihilism. That last bit could certainly go either way, sure, because throughout it all there's a certain measure of hope, but one can't help but wonder what happens when hope hits a wall, and how much a friendship, even one that's been reforged from its fractured remains, can truly withstand.
For me, it's those questions of endurance that made The Staircase in the Woods so damnably compelling. I found myself trapped by this book's gory hooks, but it was the human elements that truly captivated me, the relationship dynamics, their responses to each new piece of unraveling information, and their puzzling over what exactly was happening to them, whether or not they'd figure it out and how, and what then? I couldn't help but recall the tagline to the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, "Who will survive and what will be left of them?"
I couldn't help speculating, too, on other pieces of media that The Staircase in the Woods exists in conversation with. Wendig taps into a serious House of Leaves vibe, sans all the heavy extracurricular homework, not to mention Reddit creepypastas and The Backrooms, with overarching shades of Richard Matheson and Stephen King, the latter if only because every current-generation horror writer exists in the shadow of King, whose continuing work and legacy reaches oh so very far and wide that it becomes impossible not to touch in some way, shape, or form, even if only incidentally. The Staircase in the Woods is a shifty, shifting hodgepodge of inspirations that ultimately come together in unique, and uniquely infectious, ways, inside and out. It cuts and crawls its way into you, burrowing into your heart and mind, twisting and changing as it grows deeper inside you, and isn't that just the best kind of horror?
