Book 30 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Quite confident I’m going to crush my goal this year. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

I’ve been “internet friends” with the super talented Chuck Wendig for quite some time and this past weekend I had the opportunity to go meet him in person and get a book signed at the Belmont Literary Festival! Though his most recent work is The Calamities, I realized that I hadn’t yet read his early 2026 release The Staircase in the Woods, which is right up my alley in terms of creepy topics!

The title refers to the very real phenomenon of old staircases just hanging out in the wilderness! Old houses in isolated regions become abandoned and eventually succumb to the elements; the staircase is usually centrally located in the building and built with the most structural stability, so it can last significantly longer than the rest of the domicile. This leads to the weird situation where you can be wandering a forest and come across a staircase leading to nowhere.

Such “staircases in the woods” have been the subject of a number of creepypastas, but Wendig takes the concept and turns it into a harrowing journey of friends into supernatural terror and their own haunted pasts.

Twenty years ago, five high school friends went into the woods for a camping trip and came across an incongruous staircase. When one of them walks up the stairs, he doesn’t come back down — and the staircase vanishes. The incident is a devastating blow to the formerly tight-knit friend group, and twenty years later one of the four remaining brings them back together with a mission: he has found another staircase, and this time they will all go up it together and look for their missing friend. They ascend the stairs, and find themselves stuck somewhere… else. They soon realize that they have fallen into a trap, and whatever has laid the trap wants to consume them utterly. The friends will have to figure out the secret of what lies beyond the staircase if they have any hope of survival.

Wendig’s novel is intense, claustrophobic, and harrowing. Even though it is by strict definition not a story about liminal spaces, fans of stories like Backrooms will find it right up their alley. Unlike a lot of creepypastas about staircases in the woods and liminal spaces, however, this novel is also an intense character study that picks apart each member of the friend group, their connections, and what makes them “tick.” We spend a lot of time in the past, learning about the first incident and all the baggage that led them to their modern predicament. The characters are all very well fleshed out and the novel is as much a story about how friendships fall apart as it is about supernatural horrors.

The mechanics of the area beyond the staircase (which I’ve avoided saying too much about on purpose) are also fascinating. Thanks to one of their members being a videogame designer, the friends start to look at their situation as a particularly twisted game that not only has real-life consequences but also rules — and those rules can hopefully be used to their advantage, if they can only understand them!

So overall The Staircase in the Woods is a really fun and intense novel and well worth a read! I read it over the course of about three days and had to finish the final third of the book in one sitting.

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So of course meeting Chuck I had to get a photo with him! I look absolutely awful in my opinion but that particular day was over 100 degrees outside and near 100% humidity. Nevertheless, it was worth it to get out and meet him and get great books to read.