The Staircase in the Woods – Chuck Wendig
It was a tragedy for which there could be no comfort and a mystery for which there could be no answer, five troubled young friends who walked into Highchair Rocks in Pennsylvania, Lauren Banks, Owen “Nailbiter” Zuikas, Hamish Moore, Nick Lobell and Matty Shiffman, with only four of them emerging, forced to concoct a cover story for the absence of Matty which could not shift the blame the community placed on them, knowing that the truth would damn them still further, the story of the staircase in the woods.
Decades later, their lives having gone in very different directions from what they might ever have hoped for before the summer of 1998, an email from Nick summons the others to his side; claiming to be suffering from terminal cancer it is another cover story to gather the survivors from the man who has spent his life researching the staircase in the woods and others who have sighted its strange and erratic manifestations, Nick convinced their friend Matty may still be alive and that they can find and rescue him.
Written by Chuck Wendig, The Staircase in the Woods is a confrontation with the past and its thwarted promises and the faces of friends who aged but didn’t change, at least not for the better, the teenagers who once fled their unhappy homes for weekends of smoking, drinking, drugs and Magic the Gathering now largely dysfunctional adults, Hamish having honed his body but not his brain, Owen in a dead-end job, Lore trying to fill the void of her childhood and Nick ambushing the others, captives to his own refusal to move on.
The staircase leading to a hall which branches off to shifting rooms of decaying memories, little packaged tragedies of their own lives and of every other miserable person who ever encountered the house built around it, they fall into a nightmare world which defies logic and sanity where anything can happen, games designer Lore attempting to ascertain the rules by which it works, the stakes of the bewildering situation lowered by paralleling it with a game of Dungeons and Dragons, a comparison which might appeal to a certain demographic but feels trite and facile.
Bound by what happened to them and keeping outsiders at a distance even as the years and miles separated them, akin to the Loser’s Club of Stephen King’s It, with grim visualisations evaporating when they move to the next room while the quartet bitch, moan and pointing fingers at each other, the danger never feels real and the company is unappealing, the parade of suicide girl, the tortured child who went to prison for murdering his mother or Owen’s father’s deathbed echoes of the complexity of the deeper hole of Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves.
Each room a confession they must hear, bearing witness to tragedy after tragedy, the treads of The Staircase in the Woods wear thin rapidly, built on nostalgia for a past which wasn’t all that good to begin with and spiralling around a fixed axis rather than going anywhere, a wallowing in vicarious guilt which only finds something to say in the final pages, a chance of direction which might have formed the final third of a more engaging novel rather than hanging as a question.
The Staircase in the Woods is available now from Del Rey
