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madsylvie 's review for:
The Staircase in the Woods
by Chuck Wendig
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Halfway through reading this book, I was ready to rate it an underwhelming 2/5 stars and move on. I found the writing strange, both in its cringy dialogue and prose that was so conversational that it almost read as grammatically wrong. Many lines in this book had me putting it down and thinking to myself, Please, god, stop trying to be cool with the chronically online youth. Even though I agreed with many of the political takes sprinkled into this book (and there were MANY more than were needed), the way they were used felt more like virtue signalling from a white millennial dude rather than an expression of a theme. There were metaphors and analogies repeated so close together that it felt like the book wasn't proofread. The words "a teen girl who unalived herself" were written, then approved in editing, and then published. I wrote almost two pages of (mostly critical) notes that, at one point, contained the words This is bad.
And yet.
When I finished The Staircase in the Woods, I found myself trying to dispel an intense, twisting feeling in my gut and swallow down a pit in my throat. For those of you who are normal, these are typically signs that a book has impacted me so deeply that I could consider it to be perfect. It is so good that I am choking on it.
And yet.
When I finished The Staircase in the Woods, I found myself trying to dispel an intense, twisting feeling in my gut and swallow down a pit in my throat. For those of you who are normal, these are typically signs that a book has impacted me so deeply that I could consider it to be perfect. It is so good that I am choking on it.
This book is built on a very strong foundation (pardon the house pun). Trauma depicted as a house is a notoriously strong and clever way to explore how these feelings can surround you, build walls that close you in and push into you so deeply that it starts to invade the rooms you build yourself in your mind and evict whatever goodness lived there before. But this book takes it a step further and shows how that house, when left untouched and unsupported, can begin to rot and decay. You see yourself rotting from the inside out, and the only thing you can do is continue to build wall after wall until there's a whole other house around the first house, but you keep building until what you're left with is a giant Non-Euclidean beast of a structure that surrounds a heart that can barely beat by itself anymore.
Wendig's descriptions of the atmospheres beyond the staircase make me ill. They are perfect. I love them dearly, even though they make me crazy. I was left in awe of the depictions of internalized trauma, of rot, of physical and mental decay. They, alongside the AMPLE descriptions of viscera and gore (be warned - this book is not for the faint of heart), made it so I physically could not put this book down. I ate it all within a day and a half.
While the plot of this book is fairly cookie-cutter (friends lose someone to a staircase, friends reconnect and climb the staircase to find the missing person, friends get lost in the scary place beyond the staircase, blah blah), the characters surprised me. They suck. They all suck a lot. Lore, specifically, is just the worst. The only female-presenting person in this book is the worst. Like, the absolute worst. But in some weird, fucked-up way, I found their emotional journeys compelling. It seemed as though even the characters who said and did the most irredeemable shit, the shit that didn't even make them likeable-bad but just bad-bad (I'm looking at you, Nick and Lore) were miraculously saved through the back half of this book.
In fact, many of my gripes with this book were solved by the second half. I can't easily describe this phenomenon. I believe the original author disappeared after writing the first half of this book, and a new person took over and absolutely slam-dunked the ending.
None of this novel I've written as a review is enough to describe what I'm feeling since I've had to avoid spoilers. But I think this was bad, but then it was really good. It was awful and cringy, but then it was a stunning exploration of unresolved trauma, of the power of the people we keep, and of losing yourself to the you in your head. As you can imagine, this makes it impossible to rate. My head says 2/5, but my heart says 5/5. I've settled at a 4.
TLDR: this book was weird. The writing was cringe in the first half. All the characters sucked so bad in the first half. Everything was bad, until an unidentifiable moment when it wasn't. In this moment, the plot revved, the characters became people again, and the ending landed so perfectly with me that I continue to feel ill thinking about it.