Yall know I've been on THE HUNT for a horror/thriller that really grips me, holds my interest, and keeps me appropriately thrilled. This knockout novel hits all the marks!

Matty, the Golden Boy. Owen, the Troubled Nerd. Lauren, the Tough Girl. Hamish, the Stoner Friend. Nick, the Sarcastic Jerk.

Five go in, four come out.

How will their paat rrauma shape their journey to save their friend? Can they bring their missing friend back? Can they convince everyone that they didnt kill them? Can the four friends survive the darkness waiting for them?

I stayed up all night finishing this because I just couldn't stop turning pages. I was HOOKED from the very beginning until the very end.

Thanks to NetGalley, Random House, and Penguin Random House for this copy of "The Staircase In the Woods."

All I can say is "Wow!" I finished the book (furiously turning pages) and then sat there processing all the emotions.

It was so much more than a "horror" novel to me. Sure, it's creepy and chilling with lots of triggers. But I don't want to spoil too much of it since it's more effective (I think) going into it without knowing much.

I will say we know that in 1998, five teens went into the woods and only four returned home. These five were misfits who formed their tight group over their pre- and early-teen years. But do they really know what their friends are feeling? Do they know what haunts them? Do they know how to be honest and listen and support each other?

Definitely in my list of favorite books of all-time.

I was initially interested in this book because of the description and in the beginning I was not disappointed. After a while the book just felt like ramblings and I quickly lost interest. It also ended on a cliffhanger which I am not a fan of.

An absolute terrifying, mind-bender of a book. The Staircase in the Woods felt like a successor of Twin Peaks: The Return or House of Leaves. Wendig did an incredible job of balance the surrealist horror landscape with the very real human terror of grief and regret.

Took a while to get off the ground, but once the plot was chugging along, this was a nice little read.

A group of high school friends find a mysterious staircase in the woods—one goes up and disappears forever along with the staircase, and the rest are left wondering what happened. That is, until the staircase is found again, years later, and they have to decide if they’re going to risk it all to search for him.

I’m not sure any book of Wendig’s could ever live up to Wanderers duology for me. The world in those books felt so expansive and thought out, and the characters so well done and complex, that all of his novels (before or after it) just feel like a let-down in comparison.

That being said, I do think this is his next best, and really like the concept he was working with here. The bonds we made at that pivotal moment in our lives feel so much stronger than a lot of other relationships, and you could feel the intensity of their bond in this and how the disappearance of Matty only solidified their importance in each others lives (even if it didn’t seem like it at times, the Covenant persists).

I really enjoyed the dynamic they had with each other, the complexity of being so so close to someone at one point in life, and yet then having no idea how to relate to the person they’ve become—it felt so real and relatable. That is an experience that I’m sure most people can relate to, and I think Wendig did a good job encapsulating that feeling, even though it does feel jarring to see Covid and Trump being brought up casually in novels.

The horror was also good, and even though I found the final “explanation” kind of hokey, I loved the progression of it throughout the story and the ways they slowly explored the space.

Overall, I really enjoyed this. Wendig is back in full force, and shows that true friendship sometimes means putting aside your fears and climbing the spooky murder staircase in the middle of the woods!

Thank you NetGalley and Del Rey for providing this eARC for me to review!

I think this book is a 4.5 star book. It's tough because part of me really wants to give it 5 stars, when it hit me it just really fucking hit me, but there are also enough flaws in this book that I just can't give it the full 5, so 4.5 it is.

The characters here are just *chef's kiss*. I mean seriously they are all fucked up in their own realistic ways. I can see myself in all four of our main cast, even if that might just be a huge red flag. I do think that Owen and Lore are a tad bit more fleshed out than Hamish and Nick. This just has to do with how the PoVs for the book break down and I don't think it is ultimately to the novel's detriment, its just something I noticed.

I think the biggest fault I could find in the novel was sometimes it almost got a bit too quippy. Now this is nowhere near Marvel movie levels of quippiness, but there were at least 3-4 big emotional scenes that had some sort of quip in them that just deflated the tension a bit. In a big this emotional I see the reason, but again it sort of felt at odds with the rest of the novel.

I really wanted to like this one but this wasn’t for me.

I felt like the storyline was a bit all over the place which made it hard to keep track of what was happening. And I didn’t connect with the characters at all, I just felt like they didn’t liked each other at all and I didn’t understand why they were friends.

Across the creepier parts of Reddit lay stories about staircases in the woods. Some are real, while others are made up stories, but it’s become a bit of a phenomenon regardless of whether the real life cases have mundane reasons for existing. Thus, it’s a great premise for a horror story, and one that established author Chuck Wendig capitalized on with his new novel, The Staircase in the Woods.

In 1998, several friends found a staircase in the middle of nowhere. Following a fight, and some drugs, one of their members went up the staircase and vanished along with it. Following this strange and unreal event, the remaining four were looked upon as murderers, but no evidence was ever found. They existed as pariahs, though, and carry that — as well as other baggage — to this day.

Fast forward to the present and Lauren (aka. Lore), Owen, Nick and Hamish have lost contact to an extent. They’ve all kind of gone their own ways, and have tried to put what happened to their exceptional friend, Matty, behind them. Lore is making popular video games and sleeping around, Hamish has found God and has three kids, Owen is struggling but trudging on and Nick continues to look for Matty.

When Nick emails his friends to tell them that he’s dying of cancer, they feel they must heed his message and get together again, to form what remains of their group, The Covenant. However, Nick has ulterior motives, as he’s found another staircase in a different state.

When the group ascend the staircase, they find themselves trapped in an ever changing environment with no clear idea of where they are or why.

The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig is a story of friendship, and what can happen to childhood attachments. It’s also an interesting character study, and brings up interesting points about homes. That’s all I can really say without spoiling things.

Reading this book reminded me of Stephen King’s IT, Ronald Malfi’s Black Mouth and novels like them. I recently read both of those stories and honestly liked them more than this. However, Chuck Wendig is a talented author with a good imagination, and he’s presented another quality read. One that is quite a bit better than his last work, which was a bit too out there for me. We will try to forget about the evil apples and note that this effort is more in line with above average releases like The Book of Accidents and Wanderers, though I would also put those a step ahead of it.

While I liked the ideas behind this narrative, and generally agreed with how it ended, I didn’t find it as original as it could have been. I was hoping for something really unique given the premise, but found a story that wasn’t incredibly dissimilar from some others I’ve read. I also didn’t connect with it as much as some others. Still, these complaints don’t deter from what is a good book that is well worth reading. I just hoped for more.

As it stands, The Staircase in the Woods is a quality read, and something to check out when it releases. While it doesn’t entirely reach its potential, it’s a very interesting piece on friendship, family, home and attachments, not to mention this world that is full of so much good yet also so much evil and rot. I’m glad I gave it a shot.

This review is based on a copy of the book that we were provided. Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for the early copy. Receiving this book for free did not affect our review.

This story appealed to the gamer in me. It was an immersive read that felt like a never ending escape room of horror and trauma - but in a good way. The characters are well-developed and their relationship dynamics feel authentic. The dialogue was relatable and believable. I especially appreciated the vivid imagery that set the tone and mood. Overall, this was an intriguing tale with a unique spin on a viral subject. Highly recommended to my fellow gamers.

I really enjoyed this read! I really loved the mystery/ horror aspect because this book kept me wondering until the very end. I knew there was a staircase in the woods, but had no idea what to expect aside from that! This really is a story about friendship, and friends having each other’s backs. I could have done without the political/ COVID mentions because it made me think outside of the book.

Thank you NetGalley, Chuck Wendig and Random House for allowing me to read the uncorrected proof of The Staircase in the Woods.
3.5 🌟/5, I love a good horror, supernatural thriller, but this one just didn't grab me like I was hoping it would. Excitingly enough, this is my first Chuck Wendig novel and it was enjoyable.
Having fallen down the staircase in the woods rabbit hole not long ago, I was very intrigued to see where Wendig would take this story. It was adventurous, twisty, slightly gory and definitely falls under the spooky season vibe. The downfall for me was it felt like I was reading a YA with bad language and a lot of drug use - some of the characters came off as childish, like they never left their teenage years behind once they grew up or maybe it was written that way on purpose? I'm not sure. But one thing for sure is I really did enjoy this book, I just didn't love it like I was hoping to. My main question being... will there be a 2nd book? I would love to know what happens with Matty!

I don't know why I keep trying to read Wendig. I do not enjoy his writing at all.
The storyline was all over the place, characters that I did not care about, and once again politics. So nope, for me.

3.5 rounded up to 4. Now I have to wrap this up before I change my mind and round down. 😳

For starters - wtf did I just read? This could have gone a lot of different ways based on the book description, but it didn’t go any of those ways. I would never hold a book’s own uniqueness against it, so the imagination of the author wins this a star or two.

What made me want to read this is that I have seen a staircase in the woods, and it was so hugely perplexing and mysterious that I’ve never forgotten it, or figured it out. Even though I knew there was a house surrounding that staircase at one point, the house itself was a giant mystery to my friends and me, so the fact that we went back years later and only the stairs remained just made sense in the way that it made absolutely no sense - just like the house had. Perhaps I need to write this story soon?

Anyway…THIS staircase in the woods went elsewhere.
Nowhere my own thoughts would have taken me, and I really could not put this book down. It hooked me, and I wanted to know what was going on so much that I was thinking about it anytime I wasn’t reading.

HOWEVER, when I was reading, I was hate-reading, and imagining how much the author and I would NOT click in real life. Sorry, but I hate his writing style. There are five characters in this book, but mainly four, and they all share a personality and speech habits and there is no way to discern one from another. Once I read the author’s note at the end? It all made sense. (Just so you know, the thing I just did there, where I put a “?” when it should have been a comma - get ready for that about one thousand times.)

The author writes how he speaks, and he does so for every one of the characters. They are all him. He also uses conversational deletion, omitting the first word in a sentence, (Really distracted me. Couldn’t get past it) <<< SEE WHAT I DID THERE?! I’m ok with it when used properly, but it’s really only acceptable when used in dialogue and he used it everywhere, and for all the characters, and well outside of dialogue, and it really just took me out of the story almost every time.

So while I enjoyed quite a bit about this book, this author is not for me. I have zero interest in finding out if all of his books are written like this.

Last but not least, this was one of the more unsatisfying endings I’ve read in a while. It felt lazy and like he didn’t know where to take it, so he just didn’t take it anywhere.

Ok, you know what? 3.5 stars rounded down, actually

Wow! This was my first Chuck Wendig book and I’m so happy I got to read one of his books! He is a master at writing a creepy atmosphere. I haven’t been this terrified by a book for a long time.

i am stuck between a 2 or a 3 for this book, so i’m just going to round up to 3! the plot was all over the place at points which was annoying, but the premise was so interesting that i continued reading anyways. i was drawn in immediately at the idea that a staircase randomly appeared in the woods and caused someone to disappear from a group of teenagers. the themes of friendship and grief were heavy and complicated, but i believe that’s how real life works. i was disappointed by how unlikable all of the characters were, though, as well as the ending. however, i’m probably going to be thinking about this story and the extremely creepy, hateful house for a long time. thank you to netgalley/the author for this ARC!

Thanks to Del Rey and Netgalley for the ARC.
4.5/5

"It's to us. To the....to all of us." There was a beat before she said; "The Covenant."
The Covenant. As if that was even a thing anymore. That, a bone long broken, left unhealed.'

Holy moly this was creepy af!!! But that's EXACTLY what I've come to expect from Chuck, and he sure doesn't disappoint with this story. The story certainly went in unexpected directions and the horror elements are truly shiver inducing. One of the things I enjoyed the most was the trope of a group of high school friends who come back together after many years estranged. It totally felt like a call back to Stephen King's It, one of my favorite novels. The character work here is wonderful as always, with people who are flawed, damaged and feel totally real. I don't want to get into any other specifics of the story, because I definitely don't want to spoil anything, but just know that each of these characters has trauma and secrets in their past which are forced into the light through the events of the story. There are traditional horror elements, as well as ties to D&D, video games and of course, dysfunctional families. And as I often find with Chuck's stories, there are emotional, teary moments and an ending that definitely leaves you wanting more. If you enjoy character driven spooky, creepy stories and haven't read anything by Chuck before, this is a terrific entry point to his works, and I can certainly recommend all his other works as well!! And don't forget....avoid all staircases in the woods!!

I'm feeling a bit torn about this book. The start was pretty slow, but things finally picked up in the middle, and that’s when I started to really enjoy the story. Just a heads up to check the trigger warnings. I found the idea behind the novel super intriguing, and there were some solid horror moments that I really liked, especially the haunted house vibe. However, the characters, who seemed to be in their 30s, acted a bit immature. The ending didn’t sit well with me either; it felt rushed and left me feeling unsatisfied. After getting so invested, it was a letdown to have such an open ending. I understand that might have been the point, but it just felt like a waste of my time

Thank you NetGalley and Random House Worlds | Del Rey for allowing me to read this ARC.

Yet another outstanding entry in Wendig's oeuvre! This novel not only provides an accurate view of the dynamics of friend groups, but of the 90s as well. (I cannot believe he named checked Maniac Mansion; I thought my sister and I were the only people who played that!) The 90s and current cultural references are germane to the novel and don't feel shoehorned in as fan service. Likewise the thoughtful discussion of body focused repetitive behaviors.

Beyond that rich and deep background color of the novel, we get to experience a plot that keeps you riveted and staying up well past your bedtime.

This novel was provided to me as an ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an Advance Reader's Copy (ARC) of this book.

In this book a group of friends reunite to join forces to find a missing friend, and ultimately end up in a battle between good and evil. It reminded me of the book "It" by Stephen King, with video game themes added to the mix, which resulted in a very engaging tale. I found this book to be very scary at times, and avoided reading it at night for that reason. In addition to the scary vibes, there is a decent amount of gore, which I was unprepared for and I think led to me avoiding reading it at night.

I've heard mention of some books where the house is a character (Example: The Dutch House by Ann Patchett) and in this case the house definitely is a character in the book. This book also explores friendships, romantic relationships, messy family situations and feelings of loneliness, guilt, and inadequacy. Reading it definitely brought me back to middle-school and high-school years, when I spent a lot of time reading Stephen King books, exploring neighborhood parks and woods, and looking for secret passageways in my house (I was disappointed to never have found any).

I gave this book 4 out of 5 stars because it was very suspenseful and definitely kept me engaged. It was the first book I have read by this author and plan to read his book "The Wanderers" soon. This review is also posted on Goodreads (link below).

This was my first Chuck Wendig but will DEFINITELY not be my last! I was familiar with his name but had somehow never read his books before - a mistake I intend to remedy but quick. He has a compelling storytelling style and the way he blends the friends-reunion-after-tragedy with supernatural ghost story horror elements is really something. He has an easy narrative voice and his creep-factor gave me King/Hill vibes while still feeling wholly original. With a marvelous eye for detail - both in the construction of his fantastic world and in the complex characters who populate it - he managed to draw me in, hold me tight, and refuse to let me go until the bitter end.

This was a trippy weird eerie ride and a fabulous spin on the haunted house concept. I loved the cover art and the concept of the eponymous staircase in reality had me googling to see if any exemplars were located near me!