I wanted this ARC so badly from Netgalley, and they pulled through!

For me this lived up to every single spec of hype I had heard, including me hyping it up to myself, I always try not to do that, because book dissapointment is the worst, but nothing disappointing here.

The story, a group of friends who were bonded by a oath for life, found a creepy mysterious staircase and one of them went up it and the staircases dissappears, 20 years later, it reppears and the friends now have to decide, what are they going to do?
Honor old oaths and investigate or ignore it and try to move on.

I'm a huge fan of Wendig anyway, and just finished Black Orchard not long ago and thought no way can anything be better, but this book stole my soul.

I don't get scared, but this gave me goosebumps as I read it, Chuck immerses you, and before you know it, you are apart of the story, feeling what they felt, and that spine tingling paranoia that comes from something like this.

I finished this over the weekend and have been sitting here trying to figure out how to explain how crazy addictive this book was. It was like a fully formed, well written creepy pasta, all the best parts PLUS meat and potatoes to make this amazing.

The book for me started fast and didn't slow down till the ending and the ending, yall...

I was fully invested in this one and I need everyone to read it when it releases so we can all talk about it.

This is one of those books I'll be talking about for a long, long time.

Absolutely stellar.

Chuck Wendig’s books always seem to make their way into my list of best reads of the year. So needless to say I had very high expectations going into this one.

Not only did The Staircase in the Woods meet my expectations, but it exceeded them! I know I rave about a ton of books, (I don't review or promote books that I don't like) but this book, is truly the absolute best horror book I've read this year!

One of my favorite tropes in horror is the childhood friends who reunite as adults over a shared trauma experience. Chuck Wendig took this trope and made it something completely unique and new.

The Staircase in the Woods is a genre-bending novel by one of the best horror authors of our time. From page one until the end, I could not put this one down. Atmospheric, nail biting (iykyk), terrifying, and filled with twists, The Staircase in the Woods will be an absolute delight for horror readers.

The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig will be available on April 29, 2025. A massive thanks to Del Rey Books and NetGalley for the gifted copy!

It's been a while since I read a book that so completely creeped me out, made me feel, made me hate/love the characters, made me think, kept me reading as fast as I possibly could, AND felt like the story was well-plotted, well-paced, and well-done. Wow. This was a long, meandering, disturbing adventure, and I loved every second of it. I will be purchasing a copy of this book to have forever.

Once I got a few chapters in and the setting took a turn, I was disappointed, believing I was in for a repetitive, shallow tale. But I kept reading and before too long I was engrossed in the characters' background stories and ongoing relationships. For a story based on gameplay, it was very deep and multi-layered. It is quite a long novel and again, this could have made me lose interest. But at no point did it become tedious or dull. The writer kept revealing more about the characters' histories which in turn made the characters themselves see each other in a new light. Furthermore, it made me think about people in real life and how we never really know what others are going through. This could have been a really two dimensional story. Well done to the author for fleshing it out into such a rounded, meaningful (and creepy) horror tale.

What a creepy story!! Another great book by Chuck Wendig! This is a story of five teenage friends, four boys and a girl. They spend a lot of time together escaping their home lives which are less than ideal. Until one weekend when they are out camping and one of the boys disappears under mysterious circumstances. I don’t want to give away too many details of the story but the surviving friends have not had an easy time of it in the years since the loss of their friend, Matty. I am not a person who watches horror movies as I don’t like to get scared or spooked, but I really enjoyed this book. The author has a way of getting inside your head and creeping you out! Well, I had a good time reading this book and hope you will enjoy reading it, too.

Thank you, Chuck Wendig and NetGalley, for the ARC. I leave this review voluntarily and happily. Also, thank you publishers for your hard work!

This is the first book I've read from this author, and it definitely was unique and unsettling. It was filled with dread and dark moments. There is death, blood, and downright hurtful moments throughout this book. Even so, there is triumph over evil at its most darkest moments. What we take from this is many different things hope is powerful, friends and trust are strong bonds and if broken can cause a lot of harm, and memories hold very powerful emotions and power. Even with all of that, this book has so much more in-depth moments and terror in it. There's trauma, pain, ghosts, and demons of many different sorts that the characters go through.

It was a strange staircase in the middle of the woods. Where does it go? One group of friends will find out after one of them decides to go up and disappears. After years it appears again and they decide to go after their friend. What's going to happen? What will they find? Will their friend be on the other side? Read and find out.

This book definitely took time to read. Maybe not in the sense of days but in taking time to think about what I've read. It's definitely a book to think on, and it teaches you a lot. It also pulls on your heart strings and makes you hate certain people in this book. By the end of it all, you'll definitely have a lot of different feelings for all the characters.

Somehow this book was simultaneously horrifying, amazing, enthralling, feel-good, and mind-bending all at the same time. Wendig has once again crafted a story that takes you through twists and turns, pulls on your heartstrings, has you laughing out loud, and makes you cry, sometimes all in the same paragraph. Absolutely amazing read!

Five friends, connected to each other through an oath to protect one another, are on a camping trip in high school and come across a staircase in the middle of the woods. One walks up the staircase (Matty) - and doesn't come back down. Then the staircase vanishes. The story fast-forwards twenty years later, with the arrival of the staircase again. The rest of the group sets out to find their friend, and what is beyond the staircase.

This book was decidedly eerie - there was tension and the atmosphere had that foreboding sense to it. If you are looking for writing that evokes those feelings, this is the book for you. There is a lot more to unpack with this story too, such as friendships, guilt, and our own fears and traumas. Be aware that there is a type of house that is a character as well (and know that this place does things to the characters).

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Worlds/Del Ray for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I had the privilege of reading the ARC from NetGalley. That being said, portions of this review may not be present once this book has been published!

This book earned 3.5/5 stars for me (rounded down to 3 to satisfy the GoodReads rating system). This book took me by surprise in that it started a little rocky, but then became something really interesting and creative that I quite enjoyed.

This story follows a group of five friends: Hamish, Lore, Nick, Owen, and Matty called “The Covenant” compromised of some misfit teenagers who are able to connect through their struggles and peculiarities. It reflects on an event, in which, during a camping trip, a mysterious staircase is discovered by the group. Matty sprints up the staircase, vanishing mysteriously off the edge, leaving the group of teenagers the burden of grappling with his disappearance and trying to determine what that could mean for their group going forward. Now, decades later, the group (minus Matty, as he is still missing) is brought back for an unlikely reunion after drifting apart because Nick has received a cancer diagnosis. The rejoining of the group is messy, as they try to sort their unidentifiable feelings and understand their changed dynamic as they seek to forgive themselves and each other.


So this is essentially how the book opens up for us when you tackle the first chapter. I enjoyed the awkwardness and passive aggressive nature of the groups first interactions. It felt very believable and genuine that these people are oddly defensive and unhappy to be in contact with each other. I also enjoyed the fact that a lot of their friction was trying to understand how the others had grown up in the time they spent apart, while also trying to understand them from the perspective that they’d always known them for in youth.

My first critique would be the fact that it felt as though the characters were distractingly angsty. Some of the exposition of the fact that these characters are mentally ill, could have been shown rather than told. These people suffered a loss of their best friend, had to defend themselves against their entire community and legal system, on top of the already chaotic personal lives and traumas they were all suffering from. Their angst does not need to be justified or proven, but it feels as though it was. I think that some of the angsty (sorry for the repetition, it just really is the best word) sentences could be trimmed up. This will make them feel less like caricatures.

Next, I really liked the visual of being flung off the mortal coil, however, it was used twice in 40 pages, which I think made it less impactful. I would like if one of them was cut. It didn’t feel symbolic or significant to the plot that this specific description of death be used, so it just felt like repetitive diction. If it was meant to be significant, there needs to be more indication of that.

Personally, Lore’s entire rant about AuHD and all of her sexualities was very irritating to read. I need to qualify for myself: I am politically liberal. It isn’t that I have any issue with talking about mental health or differing sexual orientation in books, it just felt so try-hard in the nature of the story. It felt like the book was trying to score brownie points and include the most specific characters. I think a lot of the writing was fun and really useful for the story, but I’m sorry, this argument between Lore and Hamish was just so headache-inducing. If there is any one thing that should be cut, it should be that. I would’ve liked it a lot more if Lore was like maybe a newly discovered lesbian and caught all of the other boys off-guard. The combination word of autism and ADHD just felt like watching a show where people are trying to write teenage dialogue using chat GPT.

All of my reviews thus far have come from the first 50 pages of the book. Point being, beginning of the book is a lot weaker than the rest of it. Once the plot takes hold, the story begins to get interesting. There is a ton of action in this story. The world-building was done so well. The environment they were in felt vivid and vast. I did not think that there was a shortage of mystery or encounter. I truly did believe everything about this setting and how the characters felt about it.

Furthermore, the characters felt very honest. Their reactions and disputes during conflict felt like genuine conversations and they did not feel too caricature-y at this point. Owen, the notoriously timid “nail biter,” was not the continuous scaredy cat to slow the group down. Lore wasn’t always the miss independent, hard ass she is characterized as. That made the book a breath of fresh air. YES. Let these real people do real people things and be comfortable with change. This author embraced their change. This made the experience as a reader so much more engaging.

The twists were tactful and useful. I thought the author didn’t try to do too much. The twists were not the overbearing, groundbreaking discoveries. They were simple, yet cut throat. Very good in an action-packed book.

There were some stylistic choices that I personally wasn’t a fan of, but I can’t say they’re objectively bad. First, there were so many modern references to Covid, TikTok, iPhones, etc. I personally do not enjoy such modern references because it takes me out of the world. I did not like hearing descriptions of what model iPhones the group had or the fact that they scroll on TikTok. It eliminated the escapist nature that I felt like the book should have had. Again, that is totally my opinion. For some, these references could make the book easier to relate to.

Overall. I really liked this book. I am eager to see what this author continues to write. I believe that this would be really well adapted as a movie or tv series. While I did have some criticisms, I feel like by and large, this is a book I would recommend and I did enjoy it.
GoodReads.com/emmapettiette

4.5 stars

Wow, this had me hooked from page one. It starts out with a group of friends receiving an email from a childhood friend named Nick, he has reserved all of them flight tickets to New Hampshire to try and find their missing childhood friend Mattie, who, during one of their childhood camp trips, walked up a staircase in the woods and never returned. Sounds super intriguing, right? Without giving too much away, Nick has found the staircase again and is asking them all to go up the steps in hopes of finding their lost friend. The plot alternates a bit from the past and present so you get a feel for each of the characters both before and after Mattie disappears. I thought the characters were very well developed, and by having the before timeline helped provide a good understanding of each character and their motivations throughout the book as well as a bit of backstory on how they all came together as friends

There is definitely a bit of horror in the present day timeline as they explore the staircase and what it represents. I really liked where the author went with this but felt it got a little repetitious. I know I’m being a little vague here, but I don’t want to give too much away. However, with that said, I also understand why it got a bit repetitious and believe it was needed once I got through the whole book and understood how it all tied altogether. The repetition was there for a reason.

As for the ending, I thought it was an interesting route the author chose to take and it was very unique. I think I just wanted a little bit more depth to it, but still really enjoyed where the author went with it. It just felt a bit rushed to me or maybe it’s just because I really enjoyed the story and kept wanting more! This author has been one of my go to authors and I am never disappointed. This definitely had the spook and horror factor for an October read. I would highly recommend this book.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review

I was running low on Spooky Szn options and then this bad boy comes along from NetGalley. What a treat to be able to read it during the right season!

Yes, this author’s books are going to be long AF…. But they’re always worth it. Actually, this one was ‘only’ 400 pages, plus it has short chapters, which I always feel moves things along nicely. The epic this time around? Five friends discover a… wait for it… staircase in the woods. (Unexpected, right?)

One of the friends disappeared when they were teens, now the rest are reuniting. There’s another staircase. It leads to dark places. Once again, you can absolutely picture this as a movie/series. Great visuals in this. Very dark and pretty fucking depressing. The ‘horrors of real life’ kind of shit.

Which of course meant I loved it and couldn’t get enough. Definitely a rough read, but so so good. The kind of brutal book that’ll stick with you. Content warnings everywhere: suicide, self-harm, murder, infanticide, child abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, child neglect… look, the world is awful, OK?

Chuck Wendig was able to create a horror novel that is engaging and worked in the genre. I was hooked from the first page and thought the idea of a staircase appearing in the forest is scary. I was invested in what was happening and enjoyed the friendship element in this. I thought the characters were well written and glad I read this.

I'm definitely in the minority for feelings on this book so take this with a grain of salt... but I just felt that the writing style was disjointed and I could not get into the flow. The musings, lengthy conversations, and meandering flashbacks just interrupted my read and made it difficult to get into. I really struggle with a choppy writing vibe (long descriptions and musings punctuated with really short thoughts or exclamations) and find it makes me almost dizzy. This was one of those books.

The characters, all flawed in their own ways, didn't resonate with me and I found them all vaguely unlikable. The ambiance was spooky but nothing downright scary.

I did feel like the premise was good but the whole thing was just a struggle to get through.

Wendig crafts an eerie atmosphere that draws readers into a haunting woodland setting, where the staircase itself becomes a powerful symbol of curiosity and dread.

The narrative is rich with vivid imagery, capturing the unsettling beauty of nature and the hidden fears that lurk within it. Wendig's character development is strong, portraying individuals grappling with their own demons as they confront the mysterious staircase. The tension builds effectively, leading to moments that are both chilling and thought-provoking.

Overall, Wendig's ability to intertwine psychological depth with horror elements makes this a captivating read. Fans of atmospheric fiction and psychological thrillers will find much to appreciate in this haunting tale.

Staircase In The Woods

An imaginative look at grief, friendship, trauma and self.

What I expected to be a standard horror about the creepy phenomenon of staircases in the woods, something’s I’ve personally done deep dives into before, turned into so much more.

The characters are fully formed, they’re broken, they are traumatized. Each in their own way.

The setting is creepy but not overly so, it’s rich and extensive and disturbing in less of a horror sense and more of a deeply personal exploration of trauma.

These two aspects together form something less terrifying and more impactful. The prose reached into my mind and rearranged it, leaving behind a sadness but also soft understanding and feeling of kinship. A sense of being seen, understood, in a way few books are capable of doing subtly.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It felt a little long, and even when I was enjoying the writing I felt like some scenes could be taken out without changing the story or vibe as a whole. Some may not like the ending, it being vague and all, but I found it very impactful.

I would highly recommend this book to others who enjoy suspense or thrillers, or anyone I’m close with that I know has experienced trauma.

Terrifying, gripping, nostalgic, and creepy, The Staircase in the Woods grabbed my attention and never let go! I was instantly drawn into the dual timeline story about a group of friends, the past, the present, and all the things in-between. I had a hard time putting this book down as I was fully invested in learning what happened when five friends walked into the woods and only four came out! I don't know about you but if I am walking in the woods and see a staircase, I won’t be climbing it. Just saying. Nothing good can come of it, and yet five teenage friends on a camping trip are intrigued and decide to climb........

Twenty years after the night they found a staircase in the woods, four friends came home. Their lives have taken them in different directions, and they lost touch after that fateful camping trip. But they have been invited back and hope to find their missing friend once and for all. If you are getting It vibes, you are not alone. But The Staircase in the Woods stands on its own (pun intended) and Wendig delivers a creepy and terrifying tale of friendship, abandonment, grief, loss, guilt, love, and the things that haunt us.

I loved the creepy and eerie vibe of this book. I also loved the tension, the atmosphere, the sense of danger that oozed throughout the book, the vivid descriptions, and the heaviness of the character's feelings. Don't even get me started on the ending!

Creepy, tense, well thought out, and hard to put down!

It’s a decent book. The prose was generic. The characters felt like cardboard cutouts of types. It was entertaining, but it wasn’t anything special. It was a formulaic story in my opinion with a couple of twists. It felt longer than it was. I don’t think it will be something that I will remember months later if not weeks.

The Staircase in the Woods
Author: Chuck Wendig @chuck_wendig
Publisher: Random House Worlds
Publication Date: April 29, 2025

Thank you @netgalley and #randomhouseworlds for the ARC copy.

Blurb:
A group of friends investigates the mystery of a strange staircase in the woods in this mesmerizing horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Accidents.

Five 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...

My Thoughts:
I picked this book purely for its haunting cover and intriguing title—and what a ride it was! The story hit hard from the start, as Nick pulls his old friends back to the darkest days of their youth. Their return to the woods unearths a terrifying, twisted reality—a mysterious magical horror house that seems to exist above everything, where survival isn’t guaranteed, and every moment is a nerve-wracking test.

I loved every character, but Owen and Lauren stole the show for me. The friendships were beautifully written, especially how the group stood by Nick through every twist and emotional fallout. Chuck Wendig masterfully blends horror and thriller, with scenes that genuinely scared me. It’s the kind of book that crawls under your skin and makes you think twice about turning the lights off.

The only downside? I felt the plot could’ve benefited from a crisper edit and more details to connect certain threads. That said, the ending was fantastic—a perfect cliffhanger that left me hoping (and begging!) for a sequel.

I recommend it to anyone who loves thrillers and horror. Prepare yourself—this one will mess with your mind in the best way possible.

I’m a huge fan of Chuck Wendig’s work and The Staircase in the Woods lived up to my expectations! The initial concept of a group of friends finding a staircase in the woods, one of them climbing it, and then disappearing is so creepy. His friends then reunite years later in attempt to figure out what happened. I was worried that the backstory behind the staircase—and the meat of the story—wasn’t going to be able to match the set up, but it absolutely did!

The Staircase in the Woods is dark, creative, and emotional. I think it’s best to go into this story not knowing too much about the plot. All you need to know is that it’s a wild ride that goes to some terrifying places.

I was excited to get an opportunity to read this book in advance. The teaser about the plot and the characters had so much potential.

Sorry to say, it didn't live up to that potential. I found the story bloated, the characters infinitely unlikable and the underlying message rather convoluted and uninteresting. I really struggled to finish.... in fact, at numerous times, I nodded off and dropped my iPad, leaving me both confused (at the storylines and lost (as to where I was in the book). For my money the book could have been shortened to a novella or even a short story. Nothing resonated with me ... I didn't even find it scary or chilling, just rather boring and meandering.