You go on a hike with your friends through the woods, as the trees clear you notice a staircase. No walls, no ceiling. Just stairs. You’d be curious and maybe ascend those stairs. When a group of teenaged friends (Owen, Laura (Lore), Hamish, Nick, and Matty) who have dubbed themselves “The Covenant” comes to this odd phenomena in the late 1990s, one of them (Matty) climbs those stairs. He is never seen again.
Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what.
Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something a mysterious staircase to nowhere.
One friend walks up—and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears.
Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy—and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods. . . . Fast forward twenty years and the tightly knit group of friends have largely gone their own ways, lived their lives. Owen is leaving on something of a threadbare existence, Lore is working in video games, Hamish has a family and is dying of cancer. That’s what the remaining members of the Covenant learn when Nick sends them all an email inviting them to his funeral.
The funeral is … not exactly what the former friends are expecting. Nick takes them not to a funeral home, but to the woods where they are greeted with another staircase that leads to seemingly nowhere. To say these friends climb the stairs at this point isn’t a spoiler.
Chuck Wendig has been able to play on emotions, nostalgia, and terror in equal parts in his previous horror novels and here in The Staircase in the Woods. The novel is told across two timelines, when these friends are in high school and their friendship as at its height and the twenty years later as they are adults trying to reconcile their lives.
The late 90s is a time I remember quite well, even if a few years separate me from these characters (I was mostly in college around this time as opposed to high school). I look at this time with nostalgia, I look at my later years in high school with fondness with some uncomfortable memories. Chuck captures that so very well. The importance of friendship, people who feel similarly bullied and bond over that, find strength in misery, and forge a powerful bond.
The bonds forged in youth can sometimes waiver. When Owen, Lore, Hamish, and Nick arrive at this “new” staircase their bonds are tested as they climb the stairs and find themselves … not in the woods they were in moments ago. I won’t go into more detail except to say that what these characters experience is unexpected, terrifying, and emotionally harrowing. There are horrific scenes that felt somewhat catered to each of the characters, the story felt even more personal and intimate with each new horror these characters experienced.
The pacing is frenetic, the chapters are fairly short making it easy to get through them quickly and say “I can get through another chapter” and then all of a sudden, more time has elapsed than I expected and I’m through three more sections/chapters.
The tension in the “flashback” scenes are nearly as high as they are in the horrific 20 years later scenes with these characters as adults. This tension allows for an equal mixing of revelation and dread across the entire novel. There’s such an intimate personal touch to this entire story and Chuck does a really nice job of the kind of revelations only adults can have when viewing the past actions of their friends. It can highlight a horror that may have been hidden and lurking beneath the surface. As these friends, this “Covenant” journeys beyond the staircase, the horrific visions they experience force them to reexamine who they are and what their two-plus decade friendship actually means. What they find looking inwardly is nearly as horrific as what their sight relays to their brains. The pacing and emotion are at a high throughout the entire novel and while the story comes to a solid conclusion for the surviving friends, there’s a big hint that maybe something more awaits these friends.
I’ve gotten this far without making the obvious comparison to Stephen King, especially It. While King is known as the master of horror, what he’s perhaps best at conveying is childhood friendships, how those bonds carry over to adulthood and friendship in general. Chuck Wendig has captured that same magic and it is on full display here in The Staircase in the Woods. Another thing that King has done with much of his fiction is to tie it all together in a “shared universe,” sometimes blatantly, other times tenuously through Derry and Castle Rock, Maine. Chuck is doing something very similar with his fiction and the Bucks County region of Pennsylvania and its borders of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. There are hints and connections to his other horrific novels and one that will stand out quite potently towards the end of the novel.
Over the past half-decade or so, Chuck Wendig has risen to the very top of my must-buy, favorite horror writers (not that he writes only horror, but most of his stuff has at least a dark undercurrent to it). The Staircase in the Woods helps to cement his writing near or at the top of that list and is a delightful, emotional, resonant, terrifying novel.
Highest recommendation.
© 2025 Rob H. Bedford
Publisher: Del Rey Books | April 2025
Hardcover 381 pages
Excerpt: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/orbit-books/ravenexcerpt/
