The woods are lovely, dark and deep…but they’re also creepy as hell and full of terrifying sights and sounds. In his latest novel, The Staircase in the Woods, Chuck Wendig gives us yet another thing to fear when we go out for a nice little walk in nature.
The premise seems simple: an old set of stairs in the middle of the forest. One person climbs it and never comes back down. Twenty years later, those who remember are called back—though not all of them willingly—to face what happened to their friend.
It’s spooky and strange…and not entirely fictional. Wendig was inspired by the kinds of forgotten ruins you sometimes stumble across in the woods: those stray chimneys and crumbling foundations, echoes of something long gone. One of these ruins in particular stayed with him: Madame Sherri’s Castle in New Hampshire, where a grand staircase still climbs into the forest canopy, ending in nothing. And that’s the thing: a staircase to nowhere doesn’t just feel wrong, it feels like something used to be waiting at the top…and maybe it still is.
Forests are a perfect breeding ground for this kind of fear. “Go be in a forest at night, and that will tell you everything you need to know,” Wendig says. The longer you’re out there, the weirder it gets.
But the horror in this book doesn’t stop with the woods. Like much of Wendig’s work, it’s driven by emotional undercurrents of grief, memory, and the tension of revisiting the past. While the characters in The Staircase in the Woods are forced to reckon with what they lost and what they chose to forget, that same theme of rebuilding something from fragments extended to the writing process, too. “The second draft is both entirely different and yet totally the same,” Wendig says. “Same plot, same characters, same structure…a real Ship of Theseus situation.”
A self-described lifelong anxious person, Wendig says horror has always felt strangely comforting. Not because it erases fear, but because it gives it shape. For him, writing is a kind of protective circle. “Reading and writing horror is like drawing demons into protective circles so that they may be interrogated or battled,” he says. “The work is the circle. It’s the place where I trap my anxieties and reckon with them.”
As for how readers walk away from the book? “Some feel there’s hope at the end,” Wendig says. “Some feel hopeless. Some are buoyed by it, some are left feeling like a cannonball just punched through their boat.” Either way, he’s happy. “If everyone felt the same thing, that might be a bit boring.”
Of course, no story about a cursed staircase would be complete without the obvious question: would he climb it? The answer is yes. In fact, he already has. During a book tour, a reader tipped him off to the very staircase that helped spark the idea for this novel, and Wendig detoured through the New Hampshire woods to find it.
Still, when asked what you should NOT do if you stumble across a staircase in the woods, his advice is simple: don’t be curious enough to walk to the edge…and jump.
