What I’ve Been Reading

I apologize for being several days late with this post. I’ve been fighting off some kind of low-grade, unspecific crappiness, which has made it a challenge to drag myself through my regular life, let alone having the energy to do much of anything beyond celebrating my partner, whose birthday was this week. But let’s do this…

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The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

With over 20 other books, including 3 in the Star Wars universe, I’m really kind of surprised that I’ve not read anything by Chuck Wendig before. I know him mostly through his blog Terrible Minds, which I read pretty regularly before the dark times. But I follow him on Bluesky, and he and Gabino Iglesius were trading superlatives back and forth, so I decided to pick up his newest book, which was garnering a lot of praise in advance of its release.

I’m so glad I did. If you want to read it fresh, go out and buy it now. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

The story is not exactly an original one. Owen, Lore (Lauren), Nick, Ham, and Matty are losers whose friendship insulates them as outcasts at their school. They refer to their bond as The Covenant, meaning that they have each other’s backs, no matter what. But there is underlying tension within the Covenant, with the love triangle of Lore and Matty, with Owen as the awkward third. In their senior year, during a camping trip in the hills outside their hometown, the friends find a freestanding staircase in the woods. After a failed romantic encounter with Lore, Matty decides to climb the staircase. He races to the top and disappears. While the others hesitate, there’s a moment when they could follow him, but then the staircase disappears. When Matty doesn’t reappear, laughing at his prank, the remaining friends realize that something horrible has happened. They return to town, cover for each other, but the event sours their friendship and they all go their separate ways after high school. Well, almost all. Owen and Lore wind up at Sara Lawrence together, but they eventually go their separate ways as well.

The “now” of the story is twenty years later, and Nick has called them all back to their hometown, saying he has cancer and isn’t going to live very long. Owen, Lore, and Ham all arrive to discover that Nick wants to go on one last camping trip, for old times’ sake. But then, they find a staircase in the woods and it’s revealed that Nick brought them home for this purpose, invoking the Covenant before climbing the stairs and disappearing. After a moment of hesitation, the three follow, to save their friends, Nick and maybe even Matty.

At first look, the five friends’ characters are built on the horror archetypes of the scholar (Matty), the slut (Lore), the virgin (Owen), the stoner (Ham), and the jester (Nick). There’s not exactly a one-to-one correlation here, but I can definitely see those archetypes being the basis of the characters. This is the kind of story that I feel reinforces my perspective that third person narrative is better suited for stories of novel length. Most of the time, the story bounces back and forth between Lore and Owen as the focus characters, but all the characters get their page time, which develops them beyond their archetypal foundations.

The characters are very well-developed, with complex backstories that are teased out during the course of the story. This was superbly done, without huge info dumps. The revelation of their backstories plays directly into the larger conflict of the story.

After climbing the staircase, the four friends find themselves in a mysterious foyer, with a message carved into a lintel above a doorway, which leads the friends to conclude that Matty is still alive and waiting to be found. This is the conflict that propels the story forward. But this isn’t the only thing going on.

The friends find themselves in a series of rooms, which have been mysteriously grafted together into a haunted house. Each room contains a human tragedy. The first room they find themselves in is haunted by the ghost of a suicide, but contains a detail that is specific to Owen, his pocketknife that he used to cut himself as a teenager. This is one of those details that takes a while to be fully revealed, which is a masterstroke of storytelling. The reader is pretty sure they know what’s up, but they want to continue reading to find out for sure. All of the friends have their tragedies, which the house brings to the surface and exploits.

And therein lies the antagonist of the story. The house is revealed to have a malevolent sentience, seeking to invade the friends’ minds and break them down. It does this through isolation, physical and mental. First, Owen and Nick are separated from Lore and Ham. Ham wrestles with his demons of addiction and infidelity and attempts suicide. Lore stops him, but just barely. Meanwhile, Lore struggles with her loneliness and abandonment which masquerades as independence and strength. Nick abandons Owen after it’s revealed that Nick had come into the house on his own, looking for Matty, only to be possessed by the house and released only to serve the house’s interests and bring the others. Owen almost succumbs to the house but is found and saved at the last moment by Ham and Lore. The three, together again, still struggling individually, resolve to find Nick and not leave another friend behind.

They find Nick again and battle the house by invoking the Covenant. But then, Owen, in a leap of intuition that the reader has already made, states the shallowness of the Covenant. Despite their professed unbreakable bond, the friends had still kept so much hidden from each other that ate away at them and their friendship. If the house represents the horrors of isolation, it’s only through truly sharing themselves with each other that the friends are able to come together to save Nick from the house, a victory that’s immediately revealed to be tenuous at best, as Nick tells the story of the first house. This revelation of backstory was brilliantly executed, not only serving as characterization, but serving as the crux of the story. The four friends defeat (maybe?) and escape the house.

But the reader is left unsettled. The central conflict and motivation of the story is left unaswered. What happened to Matty?

The story ends with one final chapter. The friends, having survived the house, had been told by it that Matty had found his way to its core, like they had, and there, the house broke him and sent him back into the world, like it had with Nick. So the friends have hired a private investigator to look for Matty. It’s six months after they escaped from the house and the investigator has found him, Matthew Shiffman, living outside Madison, WI. The friends go to confront him, unsure of what they will find, but determined to face it together.

Or it seems that way. Because there’s something that Lore hasn’t told them: about the handgun in her bag. Just in case, she thinks to herself. But that one line serves as the ultimate cliffhanger for the story. Despite everything they’ve been through, despite only escaping the house by laying bare their secrets and sharing themselves with each other completely, Lore is still keeping secrets. The story ends on this cliffhanger, with the four friends invoking the Covenant before going to face the friend whom they unknowingly abandoned, who may not be their friend anymore. But Lore has jeopardized the Covenant once more and the success of this confrontation is left unanswered.

Of course I want more. Who wouldn’t?

But I go back to a dear friend’s interpretation of the ending of Inception. It doesn’t matter if it’s a dream or real. What you, the viewer, believes says more about you and your investment and interpretation of the story than any definitive ending could.