This book is wild —dark, chilling, and guaranteed to mess with your head. It kicks off with five high school friends Nick, Hamish, Lauren, Matty and Owen, heading into the woods for what should be a normal camping trip. Suddenly, their adventure turns into something far more sinister when they stumble upon a mysterious staircase standing alone in a clearing.

What follows is an absolute nightmare. The friendships are pushed to the brink as they endure relentless psychological torment in a warped reality. If you’re into eerie, mind-warping psychological horror that sinks into your bones, this book delivers. It’ll have you questioning everything, right up until the last page.

The Staircase in the Woods is a compelling horror novel about five friends who discover a mysterious staircase in the middle of the woods, one of whom goes up the stairs and disappears. Years later, another staircase pops up in the woods and the four remaining friends go in to search for their lost friend.

It’s difficult to discuss this one without getting into spoiler territory, since a good portion of the first act maintains the mystery as to what is on the other side of the staircase.

What I will say, is that this book is very dark and it’s sad. Heartbreaking really. A novel about how friendships change and fracture and how we are meant to go through this life with others rather than alone. But also how humans infect places with their evil. Wendig writes great characters here. A minor gripe is that the middle third does get a tad repetitive, but this is minor in the grand scheme of things. I really enjoyed this one and it has some genuinely creepy moments throughout.

Thank you to Del Rey for providing me with an ARC (and approving me on NetGalley, as well!).

The book felt like an uncertain and dark dream. A dream that has a mysterious end and you keep thinking about it for days. The book is unputdownable, mysterious, creepy, and nostalgic. This story has a blend of two genres; mystery and horror. And the book has dual timelines. The ending was unpredictable.

Five school friends reunite when they receive a poignant mail from their friend. But things are not how they appear to be. As soon as they reach there, they find a staircase in the middle of the forest. One of them climbs up and then the stairs vanishes. Twenty years later, it reappears but would Owen, Lor, Hamish, & Nick be able to find answers they are looking for?

The book is nostalgic and full of secrets & mystery. From forming a bond to grief, secrets, mystery and truth, all the characters go through innumerable emotions. The character development is good. Author has also shown each characters weaknesses as well. Like fear of flying, OCD and there are more.

Thanks to the Publisher and Author

A friend goes missing, but not in the way youd normally expect. A couple of teens go out into the woods as a "covenant" and vow to do anything they need to, as a group. But when a staircase shows up in the middle of the woods, do the covenant rules still apply?

Matty disappeared, but apparently the stairs are back and looking for more players. The story is a lot like Alice in Borderland or any choose your own adventure novel. The story is unique, quirky and almost extraterrestrial. The different rooms that wind through the world bring a fast paced terror that keeps the reader wanting more. Great cover and great read!

5 teenage friends go to the woods to hang out.  They come across a staircase that was never there before and leads to nowhere.  One of them decides to climb the stairs and jump off the top.  As Matty's friends watched on, they saw as he vanished into thin air and the staircase disappeared.  He was never to be seen again.  Each one of them is affected differently by the disappearance of their friend.  Decades later, the 4 remaining friends have a reunion.  While on a hike another set of stairs appear.  This time they all decide to climb the stairs together.  When they cross the imaginary threshold, they immediately realize the hell they entered.  Beyond the landing in an unseen dimension resides a house of horrors.  The portal they entered through is immediately sealed and they must navigate through the rooms of the house to try and find their way out.  The house is very much alive.  Each room is the setting of a horrible act that once occurred and it is being replayed on loop by the ghosts that’s once lived in those rooms (the father that snaps and terminates his family, the teen that hangs themselves, the child that was drowned in the tub).

The house gets into you so that it can control your thoughts so you never escape.  It reminded me of The Ruins and 13 Ghosts. The book is not for the faint of heart.  It is very graphic and disturbing. This is very much trauma horror which I typically avoid but it is so fantastically written.

The story showcases the horrors that humans do to one another but at the heart of the story the focus is friendships. How important they are to us and the lengths we are willing to go to help each other.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House Worlds Del Rey for the Arc. What a wild ride.

Thank you Del Rey and Scared Straight Reads for my gifted copy!

“Your mind is a house of pain. Let me add its rooms to mine.”

The Staircase in the Woods is the type of book that silences the world around you. Everything stills. Your breathing is shallow. Your eyes scanning the pages rapidly. This is the type of book that highjacks your mind, so that it’s all you can think about. Every space in your brain is focused on returning to this book, this world, this labyrinth of hurt rooms. It was like being in a trance.

We meet this cast of traumatized adults who were hurt teenagers. They avoided their childhood homes, because home was not where the heart was. Home was emptiness, abuse, disdain, fear, loneliness. So they found family and home with each other, until one disappears up a staircase in the woods - which, apparently, is a real phenomenon. If that reality isn’t trippy enough, wait until you cross the threshold of some of the rooms in this haunted house of a novel.

I’ve read one book before by Chuck Wendig, and I enjoyed it, but I was pleasantly surprised by the awareness and depth he put into this novel. It held so many facets of my own life. I could see so many of my friends in this cast of characters. I could see my own house of horror memories in these ever-changing f*cked up rooms.

This is one of those books that reiterates why I am gravitating toward horror over thrillers, because it has the depth I crave. Humanity and all its ugliness is proudly displayed. The writing in this book was also some of the best I’ve ever experienced. The dialogue is spot on for millennials, and I truly could not help but appreciate being reintroduced to the word “chode,” which used to be my favorite high school insult. This book killed it and I can’t wait to read it again!

Everyone has those childhood friends who knew your parents' first names, passed notes with you in Algebra I, and maybe even slow-danced with you at prom. They were there for the awkward years, the messy years, the formative ones. These friendships are stitched with shared memories that become landmarks in your personal history. I have a group like this. Maybe you do, too.

But we also know something else: not all friendships survive the long haul. The promise of being “BFFs” can fade, worn down by time, distance, and the lives we build apart.

“The heart is where the home is.”

Owen, Nick, Hamish, Lore, and Matty were an unlikely crew. Nick and Hamish had the edge of burnouts. Owen and Lore were the overachievers, nerdy in the best way. And Matty? Matty was the glue. The golden boy. He bridged the divides between them—winning awards, playing sports, smoothing over the group’s rough edges. He was the best of them.

One night, they head into the woods for a classic childhood rite: camping. Along the way, they pass something bizarre—a lone staircase, standing impossibly on its own, leading nowhere. They keep moving. But later that night, drawn back to it, only Matty climbs the stairs.

He never comes down.

Decades later, Nick calls the group back together. Something’s waiting for them. Another staircase. But this time, it’s not Matty who has to climb.

What’s scarier than a staircase in the middle of the woods? Really—what is?

Chuck Wendig’s novel reads like a cinematic fever dream, equal parts horror and elegy. This isn’t just a ghost story. It’s about the divide between childhood and adulthood, the secrets we bury and the truths we carry—often alone. It’s about the damage done in homes that looked perfect from the outside and the roles we adopt to survive what’s happening inside.

Wendig’s storytelling is immersive and visceral. You can almost smell the rot, taste the copper of blood in the air, feel the coarse grain of splintered wood under your fingertips. The scenes are so vividly rendered that reading feels more like watching a beautifully shot, profoundly unsettling film.

I had only a few quibbles. The themes around identity and politics, particularly Lore’s sexuality, occasionally felt overemphasized—less integrated, more performative. But the emotional beats still land. Hamish’s evolution is compelling, and Owen’s constant internal war is heartbreakingly real. Even the heavy dose of video game references—which typically isn’t my thing—didn’t detract from the story’s core tension.

Because at the end of the day, this is a story about truth. The ones we hide from others and the ones we hide from ourselves. As kids, we take on roles—athlete, brain, comedian—to protect ourselves. But eventually, if we want to live freely, we have to strip away those masks and face what’s really there. In the dark. At the foot of the stairs.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and reflect on this haunting and unforgettable story.

My second book from this author (the first being the deeply, deliciously horrifying Black River Orchard), and after another captivating tale, I am looking forward to reading more.

The horror works here on multiple levels. There's the obvious narrative one: five friends go into the woods, but four come out after one disappears up an impossible staircase to nowhere. Twenty years later, they find another staircase and up they climb, only to find themselves in a house of horrors. Each room reveals echoes of pain, sadness, grief--all the worst that humans can inflict on one another. Underlying that is the horror that stems from all the ways the core group friends have let each other down--will healing these hurts be key to leaving this prison?

I had no idea what to expect when I read the description for this book, which sounded much more whimsical than this book turned out to be. This is definitely a horror novel, through and through, and I loved the conceit. So inventive in how it presents tropes we're all familiar with (ghosts, of a sort; haunted homes; etc.).

Definitely pick this up if you're a fan of haunted house horror and/or stories about the power of friendship to combat the ugliness of the world.

I was very excited to read this book after seeing such positive reviews, but I’m afraid my review will be an outlier. I think the issue is me just not being the right audience. There were many elements I just couldn’t relate to which made it difficult to connect. I do see others really enjoying it though.

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

What’s scarier than a haunted house? A haunted home. A place that should be a refuge, safety and comfort, but instead is an all-consuming testament to your deepest fears and insidious traumas. Wendig does a great job at excavating what that home might look like in this painful character study, with metaphoric and metaphysical hauntings doing the same work as the psyche just louder.

The characters are the heart of this story, a group of five misfits that we see through the POVs of two of them, with occasional flashbacks as well. Wendig can’t help but pay homage to King’s Loser’s Club, but these five are all unique and complete and painfully real. We learn about who and how they were as teenagers, the different types of broken homes that stitched them all together, and how one traumatic event eclipsed the overall trauma of their childhoods to separate them, to lead them down the paths of maybe their darkest timelines to the adults we meet them as in the present. The connection and evolution from childhood to adult is really well done, but even more so is how realized the characters feel. None of perfect, not in their villainy nor their victimhood, not in their apathy or their friendship. They are all ruins left to rot under dark skies but trying to find the spare lumber to rebuild themselves, desperate and incomplete but in different ways. Of course, when talking about childhood trauma there are some clichés or expected histories, but none feel trite or contrived. We see this group lose themselves, and go through hell to try and find themselves again.

The world-building is fun, and morbid. The real world of our characters is broken and divided present, not shying to comment on the current political climate. But the place they find themselves about a third of the way into the book, the place their quest takes them, is one where Wendig lets himself indulge in all sorts of dark and twisted ideas, set pieces sometimes elaborate and harrowing in details and sometimes just mentioned in passing, a constantly shifting madhouse of perspective and distortion, and it is a lot of fun. It works as the perfect environment for our characters’ drama to play out, inviting and all-encompassing with just the right amount of detail and shadow to feel both known and menacing. The writing itself is compelling, moving between two characters at a fast clip, balancing internal monologues with description and desperate dialogue. The writing isn’t particularly poetic but our characters are doing a lot of inner work and the writing is willing to be philosophical or melodramatic or terrified as appropriate. The plot slows down a little around the 2/3 mark, with a section where it seems like the momentum has stalled a little, but the writing keeps you engaged and captivated anyway. Mostly the pacing is efficient, not wasting any time in the beginning to get our characters right into the heart of the story’s action, bringing them together and separating them only to bring them together in good order, letting us learn more about them throughout. There is a bit of a slowdown around 2/3 of the way through, but that is in part because Wendig doesn’t want to give the characters any easy epiphanies or deux ex machina moments, and the result is it takes time for them to learn what they need to learn to move forward. The character work and world-building, along with crisp and emotional writing, make sure that there is always something to keep you interested, regardless, and the story soon finds its footing again for a memorable and nonstop final act.

Wendig isn’t subtle about the themes or ideas he wants to explore, here. He says in his afterward (and this isn’t spoiling anything about the story,) “We are creatures of extraordinary depth, a deep cavern with infinite strata, and we have seen things and felt things and experienced things—we’re reckoning with a wealth of love and trauma and pain and wonder, and storytelling, at its best, represents that reckoning on the page." Like any good story about a haunting, this story is about the people that live through it, through the hauntings of their lives and their pains and their celebrations and their friendships. It is about facing what haunts us, staring it in the face, and making friends with it.

I want to thank the author, the publisher Del Ray, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I love Wendig’s writing. Even though this book is around 400 pages, I read it pretty quickly. The story was very immersive and engaging.

At its core, this is a story about friendship, specifically the kind of deep, close bonds you form when you’re young, and how those connections can fade over time. The friend group in this story comes together in high school, standing up for one another and forming a kind of covenant. They vow to always look out for each other. But everything changes one night when they head into the woods and discover a staircase that leads to nowhere. One of their friends, Matty, climbs it and disappears without a trace.

I thought this was a well-written and highly imaginative story. I loved following the friends as they explored the rooms of this house, each one eerie, tense, and unsettling.

The dynamics within the friend group were really compelling. They were so close as teens, but Matty’s disappearance fractured everything, and they eventually drifted apart. That felt very real, because that’s life. People change, friendships fade, and sometimes things just fall apart.

My only complaint is that, since much of the story takes place inside the house, things started to feel a little repetitive. The friends move from room to room, and it all started to blur together after a while.

The ending is one of those open-ended ones where the reader is left to imagine what happens next. Normally, I’m not a fan of that kind of ending, but here, it really worked. It felt fitting for the story, and I actually liked how it wrapped up.

I definitely recommend this book to horror and fantasy lovers. I look forward to reading more from Wendig!

4.5⭐️

I liked the premise of this book, but it just felt like it went on and on. I found that I never really liked any of the characters. It's a very interesting concept though so I kept reading.

This book I can confidently say is unlike anything I’ve ever read, and unlike anything i read after. The authors mind was so imaginative! Terrifying and I never knew what kind of room was going to happen next!! So good!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for my e-ARC of The Staircase in the Woods!

𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐈𝐅 𝐘𝐎𝐔
🏠 believe houses absorb energy
🏃‍♀️ always run from your problems
👫🏼 would do anything for a friend
👻 love to read horror stories

• 𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐈𝐓’𝐒 𝐀𝐁𝐎𝐔𝐓

Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what.

Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something extraordinary: a mysterious staircase to nowhere.

One friend walks up—and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears.

Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy—and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods. . . .

• 𝐌𝐘 𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐆𝐇𝐓𝐒

Just wow! What an incredible story with an amazing plot and interesting characters to boot! This had all the elements I love in a story - horror, paranormal, character driven plot development, and mystery! The character development was flawless, and entirely necessary, in my opinion, to further the plot. Each of these characters are broken and flawed in their own way which leads to the house crushing their spirits to further its evil agenda. I loved Lore’s mind and how she was able to figure out so many things about the house and how to bypass it like a computer program. I never knew where the story was going to lead us, which is the hallmark for a great novel! The rooms changing and swirling around was a lot of fun. This would make for a very cool movie. Even being 400 pages, I flew through this book. The ending left on a bit of a cliffhanger, so I would love to see a sequel!

I’m a big Chuck Wendig fan and always enjoy his mix of horror, science fiction, and mystery. Needless to say, I had huge expectations for The Staircase in the Woods.

Reunited after years of being apart, four childhood friends reunite as adults only to discover they’ve been brought back together to relive a shared trauma that torn their friendships apart. While the trope of ‘friends returning to the scene of trauma’ isn’t exactly new, Wendig makes it entirely his own by interweaving plenty of horror-esque elements and fantasy.

I’m a big fan of multiple POVs and love when all our main characters not only have a ‘present’ but also flashbacks, especially as the flashbacks are what give us the story that led to the trauma.

While this was a creepy and entertaining read, I did find that it could have been cut down a bit. The repetitive nature of some parts (even though told through different viewpoints) made it feel longer than it needed to be. I also have a hard time occasionally with such open-ended fantasy aspects, I needed just a few more answers around how ‘this’ could even happen so something to think about. Otherwise, Wendig is always a good choice if you want an atmospheric, descriptive, and creepy read.



The Staircase in the Woods comes out April 29, 2025. Huge thank you to Del Rey Books for my advanced copy in exchange for my honest opinion. If you liked this review, please let me know either by commenting below or by visiting my:
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This is the 5th book that I've read by this author Sorry to say, this is my least favorite of the ones I read. I found it to be repetitive and there were some sections I enjoyed and some that were less interesting.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the digital ARC.

I really enjoyed this book. It goes in a direction that I really didn't expect, but if you're a fan of Chuck Wendig that really shouldn't surprise you. The first half of the book is so engaging and interesting, and was hard to put down. I will say the second half was a little too drawn out and meandering, and it could have been about 100 pages shorter. But overall, I really enjoyed it and highly recommend it, especially if you have read some of his other novels and liked them - you're going to like this.

I liked the premise of the story but I felt like something was missing. I didn’t quite have time to bond with the characters before we were supposed to be emotionally tied to the events in the house. All of this revolving around their lost friend Matty, who we don’t really get an answer on what happened. I usually don’t mind an open ended conclusion but unfortunately this one just didn’t work for me!

Thank you NetGalley and Del Ray for the arc!

ok, so, I didn't love this book. In fact, I found it hard to finish.

Bad points:
- During one of the earlier chapters (11% of the way through) it suddenly turned from caring about a dying friend to arguing over politics, trans rights, and various spectrums which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it was in your face, unexpected, and a little bit OTT.

- I really didn't like the use of the word 'unalived'. Sorry, but it's not a real word - it's a TikTok word, one that people use to try and stop themselves getting reported or banned when talking about certain topics. It's not needed in a horror book.

- The book was very repetitive; sort of the same thing happening over and over, but only slightly different each time...

Good points:
- There was a lot of background information and lore about the characters. We get to learn a bout who they are and why they behave the way they do.

- The beginning of the book draws you in and makes you want to find out more! I found myself sitting here going 'Ooh what? how? when?' and kept reading as I just NEEDED to know!

- The chapters were nice and short, they are easy to read in nice short bursts if your a busy individual who always has something going on, or just need a quick read before bed!

Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC! #TheStaircaseintheWoods #NetGalley

I will generally read anything by Chuck Wendig. This book was a wonderfully crafted folding of character and concept, with mystery and thrilling elements baked in.