Chuck Wendig

A group of friends investigates the mystery of a strange staircase in the woods in this mesmerizing horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Accidents.

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. 

Staircase in the Woods

Some great writing craft here, it hit hard I had to go back and read it again. 

BC Hark

The other thing about a house—a home—is that it is a private place. It has walls. You can draw curtains over the windows. You can lock the door.

And in that place, you can be you and do whatever it is you want to do. 

You pig out on ice cream. You masturbate. You fuck. You sing in the shower. You take a shit multiple times a day. You watch the very worst of reality TV. You plunder the liquor cabinet. You talk absolute trash about people you know, people you work with, people you love, and others you hate. You get your hands tied behind your back, you get bent over a desk, you take a gag in your mouth and a cock—real or artificial!—wherever you so choose, done consensually, with a loving partner, or two, or three.

This, too, is part of a house’s purview: a home away from prying eyes where you can finally drop the mask, lose the pretense, and be who you need to be.

That privacy also keeps hidden the fights you have. The cruel words, sharp as a tack, stuck in those you purportedly love. Your house is where you rage and punch drywall. Where families fight. Where relationships start to rot like fruit left long on the ground. It’s where kids learn to hate their parents. Where wives learn to hate the men they married and wish instead they’d fucked off to the woods and taken their chance with a bear. It’s where bad habits take root: too much drinking, too much eating, too many trips to the medicine cabinet, too much hoarding, too much sitting in the dark drunk-texting someone or trolling people on social media or flicking through the pics of an ex. Little seeds of neglect and 

pain, thumbed into your fertile dirt—seeds that grow best not in the light, but in the dark.

 Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment. And some people travel far more than others…. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.

—Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

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