The Staircase in the Woods is a rollercoaster of a read, filled with nostalgia, fear, and every part of a horror novel you know and love. The characters are fantastically rendered, both flawed and people you want to root for. Wendig’s real win is in the setting – he has created so many intricate worlds within one book, filling in the edges with the detritus of everyday life, and it made me examine my own world to see what defines me. It’s the kind of book that gets in your head and leaves you contemplating your own life. To get that from a horror novel was a surprise, and I’m just left floored at how brilliant of a writer Wendig continues to be.

Honestly, everything after this could be a spoiler, and this book is best read without any spoilers. If you haven’t read it yet, stop here and pick it up – you won’t regret it.

The Best Bits

A Few of My Favorite Things

The Characters

Our five main characters are all different and yet somehow all the same. They all have insecurities they hide in their youth that bloom in their adulthood and leave stains all around them. The four who make it to adulthood are wounded by the tragedy of their youth and it didn’t necessarily make them stronger at the start of the book, it just cast them out alone into the world. Wendig focuses primarily on Owen and Lore, but we get snippets of the other characters as they navigate in and out of their periphery. By the end, you want them to make it out and you’re rooting for them, no matter how awful they’ve been to each other or themselves up to this point. Everyone is dealing with their own crap, and that’s illustrated well here. It’s overcoming that crap and living your life that’s the hard part.

The Endless Settings

With each new room in the house, you get an intricate look at somebody’s life. Modern living rooms, old kitchens straight out of the 70s and 80s, overflowing pantries. Then you get the horrifying rooms – dead bodies, monstrous deeds leaving remnants on walls and floors, the worst of humanity captured for eternity. It starts to feel overwhelming as you read – and I was getting frustrated at the endless monotony of so many rooms – until I realized I’d just been sucked into the exact feeling the protagonists were feeling. Setting has always been my favorite part about literature, the act of building a world, and Wendig is a true master of it.

The House Itself

This was the best part of the book, making it a solid addition to the already full Haunted House subgenre. We get a haunted house that stands outside of time, where escape seems impossible, and it’s entirely aware of them. There have definitely been living houses before, but this one felt different. Most houses are hoarders if you think about it – taking in your junk, your belongings, your minutes – and storing them all around you. This house does exactly that BUT it isn’t enough to pull from one space, it wants to pull from all the spaces. What we get is a truly evil villain who just wants others to suffer, and that’s the worst kind of villain – one who just wants to watch the world burn.