Following a group of friends in alternating timelines, Chuck Wendig’s THE STAIRCASE IN THE WOODS focuses upon, you guessed it, a staircase in the woods. When the gang were only teenagers, they happened upon the aforementioned staircase with one of them traversing to the top and promptly disappearing. Although a body was never found, public opinion saddled the surviving members with the blame for the death of their friend. Years would pass, and although the group would grow apart, they all remained together haunted by what happened that day.

Now in their forties, they’re brought together once again as one of the group has received a terminal cancer diagnosis; or so they’re led to believe. When they arrive in New Hampshire to meet their supposedly doomed friend, they’re once again greeted by an unwelcome sight: another staircase in the woods.

If you think the above takes a lot from the plot of King’s IT, you’re not alone. I’ve seen folks draw that comparison across many of the early reviews posted online. However, I think that’s about as fair as saying that an author who wrote a story about a detective finding a dead body had ripped off Dashiell Hammett.

Wendig spends a good amount of time building up these characters as complicated individuals with complex relationships that when the stakes are raised and the true horror of the novel begins to take shape, it becomes an increasingly difficult book to put down. I hope I’m not spoiling too much by saying that the characters ultimately decide to follow this second staircase to its destination. When that happens, it’s easy to see just how much fun Wendig had playing with the terror and dread of it all.

The psychological horror at work here is exceptional. The story pounces on the trauma experienced by each individual character therefore making the novel go in some more than dark directions. I found myself rooting for them to make their way back to our world, even in the face of what often felt like unbeatable odds. Wendig seems to play with the fact that none of us is perfect, even those of us who have made some egregious errors in our lives deserve the ability to atone, or at the very least learn, from our actions.

THE STAIRCASE IN THE WOODS a solid standalone horror novel and a great follow-up to his tremendous BLACK RIVER ORCHARD (one of my top reads of 2023).