This was much better than I was expecting! Amazing concept, so visual, and filled with horror imagery. This was incredibly atmospheric and you’re able to effortlessly visualize everything. All that you know about this book from the synopsis is only the first 30% of the book. After that, the rest is a complete mystery until you read it. Hint: what happens after they all go up the stairs that lead to nowhere and all the crazy things that happen next. It’s completely unpredictable and I had no clue what was going to happen next. Once they go up the staircase I could not put this down because I was desperate for an explanation for what was even going on.

Along with being so easy to visualize, unpredictability is this book’s other strong suit. I’ve read enough books where I can predict most things and at least have an idea of where things might go, but this was so unpredictable I had no clue or guesses what was going to happen next or where this book was even going. Those are definitely this book’s two strongest suits, the easy visualization and unpredictability due to a really good concept. The visuals, the setting, it was all so easy to picture, just like a movie.
I really couldn’t guess where this was going or how they were going to get out of this one.

The concept was brilliant, with high enough stakes that keep it compulsively readable. This book is claustrophobic and imaginative and so visual. From about 30 to 70 of this book, I was starting to think that this was going to be up there with Incidents Around The House, what I personally think is one of the best horror novels written. But this lost me once you find out the explanation behind it all. I enjoyed this book but I had to take off a star because I thought that the explanation behind the staircase was too wacky. Even for a fiction novel.




ENDING SPOILERS AHEAD DO NOT READ IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE SPOILED





































Sorry but the explanation behind the staircase made no sense. How can trauma make an inanimate object become sentient? Because that’s what a house essentially is. A man made object. Even within the realms of fiction, how in the world does it make sense that man made objects, like houses, become “reborn” with sentience after being destroyed because dark things happened within it? Bad experiences happening around an object can’t bring said object to life. Apparently the explanation is that bad things happened within the house so that somehow made the house come alive and I guess magically gave it a working brain to manipulate people? Like, huh? Sorry but this was too much of a stretch. This needed a better explanation.

Details aside, I did enjoy this. It just kind of lost steam after the 70% mark but I did like how it ended.

Thank you to Netgalley and Del Rey for sending me an advanced copy in return for my honest review.

3.5 stars ⭐️

Five friends go on a camping trip and find a staircase. The staircase is just in the middle of the woods and leads to nothing, or so they thought. When one of them decides to climb the stairs he mysteriously disappears and it changes the rest of the group forever, Now twenty years later the staircase seems to have reappeared. Determined to find out what happened to their friend all those years ago the friends climb the stairs.


I want to thank NetGalley and to the publishers for giving me this arc in exchange for my honest review.

As soon as I read the description I instantly wanted to read this book, it screamed creepypasta (which I love) and I’ve been wanting to check out this author for a while.

This book is about fear, friendships, and trauma. The things discussed in this are very heavy,there were moments I had to put it down for a while. I won’t lie, reading this messed with my mental health a bit. I definitely think anyone who reads this should prepare themselves a bit by looking up trigger warnings.

I hurt so deeply for these characters and the ending crushed me.

I will say I enjoyed Chuck Wendigs writing style so I’m definitely going to be checking out their other work.

Does Chuck Wendig ever disappoint?! I quite literally squealed when I saw I was approved for this NetGalley ARC and let me tell you I am so happy I did not sit on this. This is high up on my charts for favourite horror read. It hooks you in from the first page and doesn’t let you go until the last. It fills you with such a sense of dread and unease but you can’t put it down. It LITERALLY gave me nightmares last night, that’s how deep this book sewed into my mind!

Like others have said, it gives you a very Stephen King vibe at the beginning. A group of kids who get back together again as adults to solve the mystery of their missing friend twenty years ago and the mysterious staircase in the woods. It’s hard to say much more than that without spoiling anything. But I was so immersed in this book. It was gripping and terrifying but also tugged at my heartstrings with all the trauma and loss these characters have bonded over. It’s a horror coming of age novel that I won’t stop thinking about for a long time.

Have you ever played a video game where you travel through rooms in a house, trying to find an exit? If you have, you know all the rooms have booby-traps that can wipe you out in an instant. Yet you keep playing because you want to get out of that house and you want to win. The Staircase in the Woods is much like one of those games, with the exception being that the booby-traps are deadly serious. The novel is about a group of friends who bond when they are in middle school. Four of them are misfits. Owen, afraid of his own shadow and terribly insecure; Lauren, who is probably brilliant, but has always been alone; Nick, endlessly sarcastic who harbors a dark secret; and Hamish, a big overweight kid, the butt of bullies’ jokes. The fifth member of this squad, is Mattie, who seems to be an outlier. He is the perfect kid. He stars in school plays, gets good grades, succeeds at sports, and all those other attributes most parents wish their kids had. Yet, he and the other four become best friends and, in fact, form what they call “The Covenant” to protect and defend each other.

The novel starts when they are adults and have grown apart. Owen receives a call from Lauren (now called Lore), about an email she received from Nick. Nick says he is dying of pancreatic cancer and is invoking “The Covenant”, demanding that his friends come see him. Reluctantly, they comply and fly to Boston where they are greeted by a limo. The limo takes them, not to a hotel, but to the woods. Nick tells them they’re going camping and a disgruntled Lore, Owen, and Hamish follow him into the forest. They finally come to a clearing and there it sits – the staircase in the woods. Something they’ve dreaded for years.

The novel then shifts back in time to 1998 for another camping trip. It’s then that they see the first staircase and Mattie, having had a tiff with Lauren, decides to ascend it. When he gets to the top, he disappears and is not seen again.

Now, years later, Nick challenges his 3 remaining friends to help him find Mattie by invoking, once again, “The Covenant.” Thus, the four ascend the staircase and find themselves trapped in a malevolent house with no windows or doors.

The Staircase in the Woods is a superb horror novel. The characters, while, at first, are not really likeable, grow on you and, as they travel from room to room trying to find an exit and their lost friend, you can’t help but root for them. A thoroughly addictive read, I found it hard to put down. The Staircase in the Woods is highly recommended for lovers of horror fiction, intricate puzzles, and video games like the one described above. It’s an absolutely amazing and thrilling read.

I want to thank NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced reader copy of The Staircase in the Woods in exchange for my honest review.

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read this in exchange for an honest review.

I loved this! The Staircase in the Woods was It meets Cabin in the Woods and it was sooo great! After a high school boy climbs a mysterious staircase in the woods and disappears, his four friends can't figure out what happened. Twenty years later, they come back together to determine what exactly is at the top of the staircase in the woods. Very creepy. 4.5 stars rounded up to 5.

October is a perfect time to read this spooky book. Definitely a sci-fi/mind fuck sort of horror-ish vibe. Sort of reminds me of that scary movie, 13 ghosts. It’s well written but this needs to be the genre you’re looking for in order to like it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the author for providing this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

16% in, and this is possibly the only "live" sentiment I'll post. First, I love it, and we've just entered the woods. I'm seeing a lot of Stephen King comparisons, but nobody's mentioned how much this also feels like <a href="https://amzn.to/4eRCeQS"><i>Die</i> by Kieron Gillen</a>. I have no idea what's about to happen, but I'm a little upset I have a day job right now. Actual review to come in the next few days.

Finished!
I absolutely loved this book! I'm sticking with the <a href="https://amzn.to/4eRCeQS"><i>Die</i> by Kieron Gillen</a> vibes more than <a href="https://amzn.to/3A8Gblk"><i>It</i> by Stephen King</a>. I'm sure it can be said that maybe Gillen pulled influence from King when putting together his story, but the comparison really ends at "5 firends in the woods + tragedy". I'm also fully aware that Chuck is working on a story for the <a href="https://amzn.to/3UgTl6I" >The End of the World As We Know It</a> and that Wanderers had The Stand vibes, but this aint them things 😉

Chuck broaches questions of identity, trauma, depression, what the fuck we do with our friends who make politics their personality, and how we get through that without being ham-fisted about it. He takes friends, acknowledges their idosyncracies, puts'em through some spooky shit, and it's fantastic!

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.