Synopsis:
ive high school friends, bonded by an oath to protect each other no matter what.
On a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something extraordinary: a mysterious staircase to nowhere
One friend walks up – but never comes back down.
Now twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared, and the friends return to find the lost boy – and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods…
Review:
There’s a reliably unsettling formula in horror that continues to delight me. You take an estranged group of friends, bound together by some shared trauma, preferably by way of some inexplicable terror (killer clowns, missing kids, so on and so forth) and get the band back together decades later. Stephen King does it in “It,” Ronald Malfi does it in “Small Town Horror,” Shaun Hamill does it with “The Dissonance, and now, Chuck Wendig does it with “The Staircase in The Woods.” I don’t want you to think for a second though that Wendig’s latest is pastiche or homage by any definition. He adds into the equation: mythic Americana folk horror, unsettling domestic surrealism, and one of the most expansive, impressive and hungry haunted houses I’ve ever had the deep displeasure of reading about. “House of Leaves,” meets “Monsters Inc,” meets creepypasta in this high-octane, big-concept story of friendship, guilt and trauma, which simultaneously reads like a whispered camp-fire tale and modern gothic epic. My utmost thanks to Del Rey UK for my ARC copy, you can enter the woods yourself from April 29th- just make sure you can find your way back out.
We begin in familiar yet fertile horror territory. We follow five teenage protagonists with teenage problems: Nick, Lauren (Lore), Hamish, Owen and Matty. The group have their cracks, love triangles, drink and drugs, and the usual suffocation of small towns, but are held together by the glue of the covenant, which was formed in the face of a group of bullies. Here’s where things get weird. The group wander into the woods one night, and come across the titular staircase. No ruins surround it, it’s just there… and Matty goes up it. When he reaches the top, he disappears. Things are a little more grave than the broken rib he may have sustained had he fallen off and landed on the other side, because he’s actually, literally vanished. And he doesn’t come back. Twenty six years on, the group aren’t friends so much as they are acquaintances, and some of the remaining four have moved on more than others. What’s for certain though is that each of them were there the night that Matty vanished, and none of them have quite come to terms with the staircase in the woods.
What makes the book so compelling, beyond its short, sharp chapters (I read the bulk of this book with the caveat it would be “Just one more chapter,”) and some genuinely pants-darkening horror, is its clear-eyed examination of trauma, and how it calcifies into character. How it seeps into our foundations and when unresolved can harden into something indistinguishable from identity. The covenant are not brought back together again on the basis of a noble rescue mission or selfless quest. We follow broken adults, lugging baggage of guilt and grief and shame, united not by camaraderie, or even friendship, but damage. Wendig grounds even the most supernatural horror in very human stakes: Can people really change?
The staircase itself may be a gorgeous and eerie centrepiece, but in my opinion the characters, and the messy tangle of emotions they bring with them are the stars of the show. The stale romance, bitter jealousy, the sharp edges of resentment that are only slightly dulled by time, amidst rekindling friendship, moments of nostalgia that are both soft and comforting and sharp and painful. It’s authentic.
A book packed with horror, but with heart to match, “The Staircase In The Woods,” is Wendig’s darkest yet. A story about broken people, splintered friendships, and, well, a staircase in the woods, my nightmare tank is fully refuelled, and the child who used to scroll r/nosleep under the covers is nourished.
Leave a Reply