Had a few folks ask about the Evernight Edition (from Illumicrate) for The Staircase In The Woods, and I did not think it was available for those who did not subscribe to that particular book box. And yet! Apparently there is some overage they buy, and they then make that overage available to purchase as an individual box — so, if you want that, just click this link and go for it.
Note, it is in the UK, but I’m to understand they’ll ship stateside!
Above is a shot of the sprayed edges (aka, SPREDGES) of the book — I am hesitant to show much more yet of what is honestly a truly beautiful edition of this book, because you could argue it offers up some spoilers. But it is RILL PRETTY, and I’m very lucky that such a cool thing was made.
(You can also get a signed, personalized hardcover from Doylestown Bookshop here, if you’d rather.)
(Also, did I mention it’s gone into a second printing already??)
This is how they describe it at their site —
We’re delighted to present our Evernight April 2025 box!
Be careful when you go into the woods, for there are horrors which might haunt you forever . . .
Our April Evernight book is a standalone psychological adult horror! Twenty years ago, a group of friends camping in the forest found a staircase in the woods which appeared to lead to nowhere. But when one friend walked up, they vanished—and so did the staircase. Twenty years later, the staircase returns and so does the group, gathering to find their missing friend and discover the truth of the staircase in the woods.
Our Evernight Exclusive edition is a Royal hardback and features:
Illustrated endpapers (by @mllemiaaraujo); different front and back
Bonus content
Signed by the author
If you like spooky house books and the friend group aspect of IT, we think you’ll enjoy this one!
The book at a glance:
Standalone psychological adult horror
Featuring: exclusive redesigned cover; full colour art on the hardback; digitally printed edges; illustrated endpapers; bonus content; signed by the author
Dr. Therese Blake is a homebody archaeologist devoted to the history of planet Earth. But when her sister Lissy makes a stunning discovery near an abandoned colony on a distant exoplanet, the sisters team up to discover its secrets.
Eerie, luminescent images cover the walls of an underground cavern. The glass garden looks like a payday to Lissy, who’s been struggling to turn a profit to keep her salvage crew fed and paid. Therese, however, insists on careful academic procedure. She can’t figure it out: Is the anomaly an artificial creation–or a living organism?
As the anomaly’s mystery draws the sisters into an obsessive orbit, it turns out neither greed nor science can offer protection from its relentless gravity.
I can totally write a long-form story in 500 words a day.
When I started this book, all I really had was the image of the stained-glass window and the idea that it did something bad. I didn’t know what, or why, or to whom. I certainly didn’t know how it was going to end. As someone who likes her outlines, this was worrisome.
So I decided I would try to write by the headlights, as that quote from E.L. Doctorow explains. I made up some characters, put them on a spaceship because why not, and took it from there. I found myself focusing on descriptions—kind of unusual for me.
That first draft is interesting to me now. Plot points and whole characters are introduced and slowly disappear from the narrative as I learned what was necessary and what wasn’t. The story consumed them, which is fitting, but the draft preserves their ghosts.
Anything can be inspiration.
Especially if you’re going slowly, which makes this a corollary to my first point. Did I mine my background as an Egyptologist and former professor, stuff which just happened to be lying around on the floor of my brain, as fodder for this story? Absolutely.
But I also learned to appreciate things I found my path. Literally. I make reference to a poor bunny rabbit on the sidewalk one summer afternoon, its inner workings on display between ministrations from the local birds. People ahead of me were clearly disgusted. I was fascinated. I mean, how often do you get to see a wild animal so closely? I went home and wrote a description of what I’d seen, which led my brain to make a connection, then another, and now that bunny lives on in my novella, where he is of course still quite dead.
Research is important, but confidence in what you’ve made up is key.
One of my characters is a scientist. Another is a starship engineer. I am neither of those things, though I did intern at an engineering firm in college. This helped me know where to go when the scientist needed a panoply of gear to do his job. I read up on various sensors and added them to his cart, like how it used to be my job to collate and send press releases for new products.
The engineer was a little trickier, so I did that writer thing where I make stuff up. Grounded in my own frustrations with tech, of course. I have no idea if the engine room I created lines up with those of real interstellar ships (and at this point in technology, no one does) but it was important to me writing the story that I not care. This was my ship, and my character, and together we knew all we needed to know. The best compliment I got when sharing these scenes with my writer friends was when the engineer among them told me, “The engineering feels real.”
You put ship names in italics.
As a grammar and punctuation nerd, I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t know this rule. A ship’s name is treated like the title of a long-form work. That makes perfect sense. A ship is a big story, after all, with a beginning, middle, and end. Absolutely crammed with details. It deserves the italics.
I am a horror writer.
In soliciting blurbs for this book I received an ancillary comment that stuck with me: “You write some messed-up stuff, Jessica, gotta say.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard something like this. A beloved professor reacted to my first published short story with “EWWWW!” But I never considered myself a writer of “ew,” or “messed-up.” I never considered myself a writer of horror. Dark fantasy, sure. The occasional twisted fairy tale. Is a cannibal wedding really “ew?” I hadn’t thought so. There’s a chance I was just too close to the idea; I remember Tim Gunn telling a designer, who used human hair as fringe, that the designer had been in the monkey house at the zoo for too long and didn’t notice what was obvious to newcomers.
Maybe my hesitation to take on the moniker is left over from my childhood. I can recall in great detail the pieces of media that sent me out of the TV room to cower. Even today, I come to a lot of horror through summaries on Wikipedia, and go no further. I don’t like being scared. I’m the weenie Emily C. Hughes is writing for. The idea that I create horror seemed counterintuitive. Sure, I wrote a vampire novella, but it was a tragic love story and composed in sonnets, for cryin’ out loud.
But the more I think of it, horror is a vast, varied genre, and I do love it. I love beautiful horror. I love elegant monsters in human form, non-human form, and transformations between. I love dark spaces and magic.
And I write it.
Jessica Lévai has loved stories and storytellers her whole life. After a double major in history and mathematics, a PhD in Egyptology, and eight years of the adjunct shuffle, she devoted herself to writing full-time. You can find her work at Strange Horizons, Cossmass Infinities, and Reactor Magazine. Her first novella, The Night Library of Sternendach: A Vampire Opera in Verse, won the Lord Ruthven Award for Fiction. She dreams of one day collaborating on a graphic novel, and meeting Stephen Colbert. Check out her website, JessicaLevai.com, for links and more.
And, just like that — *thunder rumbles* — IT IS DONE. We’re now two weeks past the Staircase in the Woods launch, and holy crap, was it good. The tour was great — last week’s events with Clay McLeod Chapman at Doylestown Bookshop and Nat Cassidy at Midtown Scholar were epic. Both were blowouts and at such great stores with such incredible staff, and bonus, Cassidy and Chapman are both great authors and it felt natural to hang with them. Honestly, same with all my conversation partners over the course of the tour — Cina Pelayo! Holy shit, Cina Pelayo, an honor to hang with her, so much goodness there. ML Rio! The best! Just the best. Lauren Thoman! Wonderful. I am fortunate that I get to hang out with such cool, talented writer folk.
And I’m fortunate to have such great readers who show up to these events and support myself, the other authors, and the stores.
Speaking of the stores, thanks so much to all the bookstores who hosted me — Parnassus, City Lit, Gibson’s (Ryan! Cordie!!), B&N Philly, Poisoned Pen, Mysterious Galaxy, Nowhere Bookshop (Jenny Lawson! Ahh!) and of course, Doylestown and Midtown Scholar.
Great stores. Go to them. They probably all have some signed stock left behind — and if you want signed, personalized copies still, Doylestown Bookshop can get you there, just click here and have at it.
It’s been an awesome ride so far and I look forward to more and more readers finding the book. As always, if you read it and liked it, please tell a friend, a family member, a cherished frenemy, a woodland creature, a supernatural entity, whatever. And do leave a review somewhere! Unless you didn’t like it, in which case, please gently deposit your bad review in the hollow stump in the dark forest where all the bad reviews must go.
(The moss-elves will handle it from there.)
If you would like more books of mine and don’t know where to start, there are a few sales afoot — Black River Orchard is on sale for $5.99 at your local ebookmonger, and Book of Accidents is $4.99 on digital, as well. And while my preference is always you buy from indie bookstores, for some reason the hardcover for Staircase is only $13.99 at AMZ right now, so for those who must be frugal, that’s certainly an option as well.
OKAY, thanks, all, more as I have it — keep on walking up the staircase, it’s totally fine, perfectly safe, there’s nothing worrisome at the top at all, nope.
So, I’ll do a proper tour wrap-up next week but — hey, whoa, what, The Staircase in the Woods is now a USA Today bestseller:
So that is very, very exciting. In addition, it’s also the top horror bestseller in audio at Libro.fm, which is surely in part due to the excellent narrators — Amber Benson, Jay Myers, and Xe Sands. Libro.fm is a great place to buy audio, as they are independent and give back to independent bookstores.
I also don’t have final sales numbers for the book, but it does look like it will have in its first week surpassed the first week numbers of my last two adult books, so that’s also a good sign. I’m hoping people keep finding this book or it keeps finding them by stalking them in the woods, where every time you turn around on the trail, you see the book just barely peeking out of a rotten stump, or up in a tree, or behind a pileated woodpecker.
Also, if you’ve checked out the book and enjoyed it, the greatest thing you can do is tell everyone! Leave reviews, tell your friends and family and even a few frenemies, carry the book with you everywhere and gently tap people with it and say “you just got STAIRCASED, now you have to go buy the book and if you don’t, bad luck will plague you eternally.” This cannot fail. These are good marketing strategies.
The book gets to live and exist thanks to readers reading it and caring about it and carrying on about it, so thank you in advance for doing that.
Beyond that — bookstores and libraries are where the book lives, if you care to seek its dark embrace.
Before we do anything else, let’s just do a little awkward whirligig dance, praising the dark gods beyond the steps and saying huzzah and hooray, The Staircase in the Woods is now on the shelves of bookstores and libraries and, ideally, on your bookshelf or lurking on your digital device. And so I offer unto you your procurement options —
Signed and personalized from Doylestown Bookshop, or from any of the stores I’m visiting on tour — but also?
There. With that out of the way, some brief thoughts.
It’s weird writing a book. You take all this time to write the first draft. Three months, six months, a year, whatever. Then it enters not one, but a series of chrysalises — subsequent drafts, developmental edit, copy-edits, page proofs, tweaks, covers, marketing plans, release plans, and then one day, in what feels like fucking forever since you wrote it, the book bursts free from that final chrysalis and — it’s the book! The one you wrote! It’s kind of maybe a butterfly now but it’s hard to tell because you’ve spent so long with it, and yet it’s been so long since you wrote it, it’s somehow both troublingly familiar and also alien at the same time? You hold it in your hands and stare it with an uncanny eye, whispering, “I know you. Don’t I?”
And then it gets weirder because while the first draft was for me, everything since then has been for someone else. And now, now, it’s all the way out there, in the world, and it’s not mine at all anymore, it’s yours.
Writing a book is this mad act of being lost and then finding your way but then getting lost again before getting found again before getting LOST AGAIN and around and around you go. Carousels and labyrinths.
And, one supposes, staircases to [REDACTED].
Anyway! It’s out! I hope you like it. Thanks to my agent, Stacia, for helping ensure it has its home — and thanks to Tricia, my editor, for helping shepherd me from what was a fascinating and essential Ship-of-Theseus-style edit, whereupon the second draft remains fundamentally the same as the first, yet also somehow, entirely different? And thanks too to the Del Rey team for helping make this book look as cool as it does. I’m a lucky boy.
What is it about?
It’s a book where I’m pretty protective of spoilers, so here I’ll just go with what the cover copy says, which is pretty much the core of it:
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 extraordinary: 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. . .
No, man, what is it really about?
Ohhh. I see what you’re asking. Like, what is it about about, right? Well. I don’t know! I mean, some of that is for you to decide. For me, at least, it’s about… friendship is magic? Friendship is also hard especially as an adult? About how getting lost is important, about how regret can be a terrible self-inflicted burden, about how how if we don’t unload our baggage once in a while it will probably kill us? I dunno. You read it and tell me. I’m still kind of dancing around it, seeing through different windows.
Why do I want it?
Because it’s guaranteed to make you happy and spiritually fulfilled and also if you don’t buy it I’ll cover you in ants OKAY FINE none of that is true.
It’s creepy, it’s escapist, it’s puzzley. It’s emotional and dark (maybe the darkest book I’ve written, though I never write without a gilding of some light, if only to frame out the darkness). It’s twisty and turny and weird.
Because it’s kind of a sister book to The Book of Accidents.
Because it has a few little… Easter Eggs connecting my other books.
Because horror is comforting, in its weird way?
Because books are a pretty good value in this economy, many hours of escape from the *gesticulates wildly* for a pretty low price?
BECAUSE I WORKED REALLY HARD ON IT OKAY
Are there trigger warnings?
Not formally, but I’m glad to offer what are, in my opinion, the triggers in the book, but I’m hiding them behind a ROT13 cipher so you can translate as you see fit in case you consider this stuff “spoilery” —
“Chuck Wendig’s The Staircase in the Woods (Del Rey) takes a seemingly straightforward format – ‘five teenagers went into the woods. Only four of them came out’ – and adds a healthy dose of horror to it. There’s the police investigation, of course, asking Lauren, Nick, Owen and Hamish what happened to Matty that night. But the four friends know that they’ll never be able to admit the truth – that a strange staircase appeared in the woods, and Matty walked up it and vanished at the top. Twenty years later, they have tried to forget what happened. ‘Don’t even think about it. Don’t think about that day. Don’t put his name in your mind.’ But they’re brought back together when the staircase reappears, and decide to go looking for the friend they abandoned years earlier. I won’t spoil what lies at the top, but it’s pleasingly nightmarish and very messed up. I’ll be honest: it’s more horror than thriller, so count yourself duly warned. But for all ye brave enough to enter here, it’s a deliciously scary tale of friendship and courage – as well as evil, murder and all that jazz.”
“The Staircase in the Woods is a shifty, shifting hodgepodge of inspirations that ultimately come together in unique, and uniquely infectious, ways, inside and out. It cuts and crawls its way into you, burrowing into your heart and mind, twisting and changing as it grows deeper inside you, and isn’t that just the best kind of horror?”
“To say this is a haunting novel is a vast understatement with every choice existing as a ghost that lingers much longer than the turn of the page.
In what feels like an autopsy of the idea friendship itself, The Staircase in the Woods leaves a resonant notion that speaks to each reader individually, a truly haunting narrative. This is a novel that revels in the darkest corners of any room, transcending the strange to deliver an emotionally tumultuous journey of complex friendship. While there is plenty to love on the surface of this story, the underlying tones, reckonings, and reflections of each character echo with a resounding force, compounding to form one remarkable narrative. Harrowing for all the right reasons, The Staircase in the Woods gives depth to the topics we would rather leave shallow.”
“Over the past half-decade or so, Chuck Wendig has risen to the very top of my must-buy, favorite horror writers (not that he writes only horror, but most of his stuff has at least a dark undercurrent to it). The Staircase in the Woods helps to cement his writing near or at the top of that list and is a delightful, emotional, resonant, terrifying novel.”
Oh and did I mention all the very lovely blurbs for which I am grateful?
“Chuck Wendig weaves his magic once more, turning a lonely staircase in the woods into a searing, propulsive, dread-filled exploration of the horrors of knowing and being known.”—Kiersten White, author of Hide and Lucy Undying
“Chuck Wendig is the Frank Lloyd Wright of horror, and here’s his masterstroke of malaise. The Staircase in the Woods is a true blueprint for terror.”—Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
“[A] masterclass in character . . . Unputdownable, with imagery that cuts like a knife—this is Chuck Wendig at the top of his game.”—Thomas Olde Heuvelt, author of HEX and Darker Days
“Chuck Wendig has given us another stunner. The Staircase in the Woods is as mysterious, alluring, heartbreaking, ever-shifting, and unnervingly powerful as the nature of friendship itself.”—Nat Cassidy, author of When the Wolf Comes Home and Mary
“Heart-wrenching and anxiety-inducing. Like if the crew from King’s IT were thrown into the chaotic hallways of Danielewski’s House of Leaves, The Staircase in the Woods will become lodged in your mind, if you let it in.”—Jenny Kiefer, author of This Wretched Valley
“Chuck Wendig has crafted a very sinister take on the familiar urban legend. Highly original and deeply disturbing, this one will stick with you.”—Gwendolyn Kiste, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Reluctant Immortals and The Haunting of Velkwood
“The Staircase in the Woods is delicious disorienting and deeply captivating. It will pull at the threads of your psyche in the best way until you feel like you just emerged from the most exquisite nightmare.”—Alaina Urquhart, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Butcher Game
“A searching portrait of four friends trying to find the things we all tend to lose as we grow older: faith, direction, hope, happiness, purpose . . . That’s the heart of Chuck Wendig’s work in these pages, and to read a book that illuminates such profound human truths is very rare indeed.”—Nick Cutter, bestselling author of The Troop
Supporting the book is huge, and that can come in a variety of non-exclusive, non-exhaustive ways — you can review the book, you can tell your friends and family and foes, you can ask your local library to carry it, you can order it from your local indie bookstore and buy 500 copies and then use those copies to build a staircase in the woods that you walk up and then jump off of into [REDACTED] and y’know, yeah, there are a lot of cool ways. Even just sharing this post around helps.
Whatever the case, I am grateful for readers like yourselves who read these books and care about them and share the book love around. I only get to exist by the fortune and grace of your reading attention, so for that — thank you so very much, and I’ll see you on the other side.
It’s an IndieNext pick for May, and a LibraryReads pick for May. Ahh!
I’m very excited for it to be out in the world.
I’ll post the book’s more official blurbs/reviews later, but for now, if you remain unconvinced, here’s a scattering of comments from early reviews from readers over at Netgalley and beyond:
“The Staircase in the Woods is a symphony of shadows, a haunting and unforgettable journey into the heart of fear. Wendig’s ability to conjure a palpable atmosphere of dread, combined with his talent for creating characters that are both deeply human and profoundly vulnerable, makes this an absolute must-read for anyone who craves a story that will linger in the darkest corners of their mind. Prepare to be captivated, disturbed, and utterly enthralled.” — Kori S, reviewer, 5/5
“The Staircase in the Woods isn’t just a story—it’s a sensory overload, a dark meditation, and a sprawling tangle of emotions you’ll feel long after you’ve closed the last page. Chuck Wendig takes a strange and chilling idea—a staircase in the middle of nowhere—and builds a whole universe around it, brick by unsettling brick.” — Tessa P, reviewer 5/5
“Eerie, beautiful, and utterly gripping, The Staircase in the Woods is Chuck Wendig at his best. A haunting mystery wrapped in folklore and fear, it draws you in with lyrical prose and leaves you breathless with its emotional depth. Strange, dark, and unforgettable.” — Trina B, reviewer, 5/5
“Chuck does it again. Another phenomenal book. This one has some House of Leaves in its DNA. Some FNAF. Lots of Chuck — and everything you’d expect from him. The characters are so good. The plot is awesome, full of twists and turns. And the emotional core of friendships lost after time + tragedy ties it all together. Love it. You should read it.” — Jeffrey W, librarian, 5/5
“Chuck Wendig’s novel reads like a cinematic fever dream, equal parts horror and elegy. This isn’t just a ghost story. It’s about the divide between childhood and adulthood, the secrets we bury and the truths we carry—often alone. It’s about the damage done in homes that looked perfect from the outside and the roles we adopt to survive what’s happening inside… Because at the end of the day, this is a story about truth. The ones we hide from others and the ones we hide from ourselves. As kids, we take on roles—athlete, brain, comedian—to protect ourselves. But eventually, if we want to live freely, we have to strip away those masks and face what’s really there. In the dark. At the foot of the stairs.” — Stella G., reviewer, 5/5
“What happens from there simply can’t be described to any justice without reading the book. This book is going to haunt me and give me what I am anticipating to be the worst book hangover that I can remember. I read this in one sitting and became so invested in these complex and layered characters that I could not wait to learn their fate.” — Reviewer 1316058 5/5
ANYWAY, hope you’ll check it out. Also today is my birthday so you’re obligated to buy me a present by buying yourself a present. And this present is this book. It’s just Birthday Law, I don’t make the rules, I only uphold them.
