Aymar Castle has been under siege for six months. Food is running low and there has been no sign of rescue. But just as the survivors consider deliberately thinning their number, the castle stores are replenished. The sick are healed. And the divine figures of the Constant Lady and her Saints have arrived, despite the barricaded gates, offering succor in return for adoration.

Soon, the entire castle is under the sway of their saviors, partaking in intoxicating feasts of terrible origin. The war hero Ser Voyne gives her allegiance to the Constant Lady. Phosyne, a disorganized, paranoid nun-turned-sorceress, races to unravel the mystery of these new visitors and exonerate her experiments as their source. And in the bowels of the castle, a serving girl, Treila, is torn between her thirst for a secret vengeance against Voyne and the desperate need to escape from the horrors that are unfolding within Aymar’s walls.

As the castle descends into bacchanalian madness—forgetting the massed army beyond its walls in favor of hedonistic ecstasy—these three women are the only ones to still see their situation for what it is. But they are not immune from the temptations of the castle’s new masters… or each other; and their shifting alliances and entangled pasts bring violence to the surface. To save the castle, and themselves, will take a reimagining of who they are, and a reorganization of the very world itself. 

---

Write the book however it needs to be written.

Here’s the scene: it’s the fall of 2020, my second novel isn’t even on shelves yet. I need to come up with something to pitch to my publisher (who will ultimately pass on it as too weird, but I have no indication of that yet). I’ve had to do fairly big structural revisions on both The Luminous Dead and The Death of Jane Lawrence, so my agent and I assume this project will be exactly the same. But I write fast, so how about I just write the thing, and we figure out what we’d change, and that can be the pitch?

Except this book has multiple points of view (something I’ve never done) and is set in a secondary world that looks like medieval western Europe (something I’ve never done) and has a far more sprawling cast and setting than my other work (oh yes, something I’ve never done).

Cue panic. Crippling, terrible anxiety. Second book syndrome. The yips. Whatever you want to call it. I was absolutely terrified. But I also knew I wanted to write this book, and I knew I had to get started.

So I wrote The Starving Saints out of order.

I don’t mean I wrote some chapters and then had to rearrange them. I don’t even mean I hopped ahead to write a scene I was excited about, then worked my way back. I mean that, in the depths of deep anxiety over if I could pull this thing off, I wrote sentences out of order. Just little blips of phrase, floating in a big blank space, and then I’d patchwork-jigsaw them together over the course of days.

Not all of it was like this – there were some scenes I could write start to finish, the way I usually draft. But more often than not, I had to write out of order to trick myself into getting words on the page. I could come up with a sentence in isolation! That was doable! And then, look, surprise, I could see how to catch up to it eventually.

This came to a head in the final climactic fight. I had borrowed a relative’s apartment for the weekend while she was out, and had loaded up on food (and not a small amount of alcohol). I was going to finish this book, dammit. So I wrote out several pages of notes: which characters had which items and which unfinished business and which existing wounds, and then I started juggling.

I have never written a book like this before or since. It was wild. It was uncharted territory. It was as anxiety inducing as it was relieving. But it worked, and that’s the important part: sometimes you just have to change up your process to get a book out. I’ve run into it in the several books I’ve written since (while we quietly looked for another home for The Starving Saints), and each one I’ve had to find new and different techniques for getting around various blocks and anxieties and life changes.

Follow the bouncing ball.

The Starving Saints was the first multi-POV book I ever wrote. This might come as a surprise; I feel like most fantasy writers come to larger casts quite naturally. But for me, I’ve always been a solo narrator kind of girl; knowing when to change cameras, so to speak, while still maintaining a coherent vibe and narrative, felt impossible.

But I went into this book knowing I had three leads. Three voices I would need to balance and trade between. This book started its life as a game concept, with three initial character ‘classes’ to serve as inspiration. That’s right: Ser Voyne is the warrior, Phosyne is the mage, and Treila is the rogue.

I could tell you the nuts and bolts version of how I tracked the POVs (it involves color labels on scrivener files), but what stood out more to me and informed the final feel of the book was the experience of following the characters. I quickly established a rhythm that felt, for all the world, like a continuous camera shot, focused on a plate moving through a busy kitchen. Every time the plate changes hands, the camera follows the plate, and we learn something about the person carrying it.

This isn’t always literal; chapters don’t start immediately from something that ended the previous one. The characters do get physically separated at times. But I always chased that feeling; when I couldn’t capture that momentum, I knew something was going wrong. Back up, try again. Follow the bouncing ball.

Magic can be ineffable.

I wrote The Starving Saints fresh off of editing The Death of Jane Lawrence. For those of you unfamiliar with Jane, the magic system in that book is based on real world esoteric magical practices combined with some chaos magic, which is probably most quickly described as, imagine you’re in The Matrix. Will equals reality type stuff. Jane is also from the perspective of an autistic accountant who’s getting really into calculus during the events of the book, which combines into a tense mash up of rules-based logic and force of will power.

Going into The Starving Saints, I wanted to do something different. On the one hand, I could have gone in the direction of magic is known, magic has rules, magic is essentially a math equation with limits. On the other hand was something far more wibbly-wobbly: instinctive but nonsensical appearing power.

Like in Jane, I thought it would be more interesting for our magic user (in this case, the heretical nun Phosyne) to not understand what the fuck she was doing. And, more importantly, she can’t explain it to anybody else, either. She can purify water. How? It involves rat poop! An ever-burning candle? Some sulfur and a particular musical note. She has no spellbooks available to her, no tutors, not even really trial and error. She comes from a religious background based in engineering and the scientific method, but she winds up relying on intuition and coincidence. The sort of magic you only learn by catching a particular angle of the sun on the river, and something inside of you clicks into place.

Of course, you (the writer) still need to establish some rules behind the scrim of unreliability. I can tell you Phosyne’s magic is ultimately element-based, with some connections to alchemical theory. I can tell you who can and can’t access these skills, and what it means that Phosyne is seemingly a natural. And through the book, I’ll give you the crumbs you need to put it together yourself, or, at least, to believe what I’m telling you. But overall, the effect is this: magic is not something designed for humans to understand. 

The creatures that do are dangerous.

Cannibalism comes in many flavors.

Ah, cannibalism. Gut-turning, triggering, and–sexy?

Broadly speaking, I find cannibalism falls into a few distinct camps in the public consciousness:

1. True crime cannibalism. The gross-nasty. Dahmer and Nilsin. For some reason, a lot of these real-life cases and stories inspired by them include absolutely atrocious attempts at cooking.
2. Survival cannibalism. Your Donner Party, your tragedy of the Essex, your Uruguayan rugby team in the Andes. Depending on how people are driven to eat each other, we feel either pity or queasy sympathy.
3. Xenophobic exaggerated cannibalism. You know the kind; such and such ‘savage’ tribe eats people! How monstrous! Except, when you dig a little deeper, it’s usually not so simple, or so legit. Accusing another group of society-level cannibalism is a great way to dehumanize them. 
4. Aesthetic cannibalism. This is where we hit NBC’s Hannibal, and a shocking amount of queer media. Cannibalism as art, cannibalism as desire, cannibalism as transgressive temptation.

For The Starving Saints, I pulled heavily on both survival and aesthetic cannibalism. The people of Aymar are poised on the edge of eating their dead to survive when the Constant Lady and Her saints arrive with feasts; the king and his council are discussing the best way to process the dead and distribute the meat as part of rations in a way that won’t spark panic. And when the Constant Lady sets Her tables, Her dinner guests can’t see the true nature of what they’re eating.

In both cases, the origin of the food is intentionally concealed. 

There’s nothing people hate more than being tricked into cannibalism. And it can be argued that cannibalism is a cheap trick all around. An easy way to disgust the average reader. But, done well (and by well, I mean thoughtfully, with nuance and specificity), there’s much to mine from it. Luxurious descriptions of feasts can both turn the stomach and entice. And there’s a certain intimacy involved, when the food is beautiful and delicious, when it is fed by hand, when everybody around you is indulging and in ecstasy from the transgression. When there’s no other food available, wouldn’t it be pragmatic to give in?

And is one bite really enough to damn your soul?

Lady knights can be sad war criminals, too.

Okay, upfront: we’re not talking about genocide here. I do have lines that can’t be crossed for me to still find a character sympathetic. But war is gnarly, and soldiers are constantly put in positions of complicity, guilt, heroism, honor… and lady knights are a fantastic place to play with all of that complexity. 

My OG lady knight obsession was Ser Cauthrien from the video game Dragon Age: Origins. She’s Teyrn Loghain’s right hand woman, before and after he heinously betrays the country of Fereldan in an attempt to protect it from a perceived foreign enemy, Orlais. He grew up in a country under occupation and is the hero who liberated it; she grew up in that shadow and was shaped indelibly by it. So when he becomes obsessed with the idea of Orlais re-invading, to the point where he ignores the actual big bad and does horrible things to the country he loves, she’s along for the ride… right up until she is faced with the player characters, who can convince her that she’s chosen the wrong side. (Or who can just lock swords with her for one of the most difficult optional fights in the game.)

Has she done horrible things? Absolutely. But she did them out of loyalty and love, and is haunted by them all the same. It’s tragic and crunchy and messy.

So back to The Starving Saints, and one of the protagonists, Ser Voyne. Ser Voyne was a war hero, but she’s now been reduced to, essentially, a trophy; she’s at the king’s side whether she wants to be or not, paraded around looking fancy but kept from doing what she really wants to do: serve her country. She’s got skeletons aplenty behind her, and regrets, and a whole lot of impotent rage at her situation… and that’s before she’s trapped in a castle under siege, unable to liberate it herself, unable to do anything but watch everything fall apart.

And then one day, the goddess she regularly prays to appears in the flesh, offering a better leader to serve…

Mmm mmm mmm, that’s some good cooking.

---

Caitlin Starling is the nationally bestselling author of The Death of Jane Lawrence and the Bram Stoker-nominated The Luminous Dead. Her newest novels, The Starving Saints and The Graceview Patient, epitomize her love of genre-hopping horror; her bibliography spans besieged castles, alien caves, and haunted hospitals. Her short fiction has been published by GrimDark Magazine and Neon Hemlock, and her nonfiction has appeared in Nightmare, Uncanny, and Nightfire. Caitlin also works in narrative design, and has been paid to invent body parts. She’s always on the lookout for new ways to inflict insomnia.

The Starving Saints: Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon

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:

• An exclusive redesigned cover (art by @elorasperber; design by @chattynora)
• Full colour art on the hardback (by @ dearchitecturart)
• Digitally printed edges (by @chattynora)
• 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
• Diverse cast, queer representation

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.

The Glass Garden: Bookshop.org | Amazon

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.

The book has now hit:

The USA Today bestseller list.

The Sunday Times list in the UK (at #3?!)

The Publishers Weekly list.

The NAIBA Indie list.

The Indie Bestseller list.

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.

And you can always get any of my books signed and personalized from Doylestown Bookshop.

Plus, tonight — last stop of the tour! Me and Nat Cassidy sitting in a tree, b-o-o-k-t-o-u-r-i-n-g, at Midtown Scholar, in Harrisburg. Come see us! Or be drenched in shamesweat! Sour, pickly shamesweat!

Okay! More later! Bye!

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?

Bookshop.org, Kobo, libro.fm, B&N, Apple Books, Amz, PRH Website

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” —

frys-unez, fhvpvqny vqrngvba, qbzrfgvp ivbyrapr, puvyq nohfr, puvyq frkhny nohfr

Can I read people saying nice things about the book?

Sure!

The Guardian said this:

“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.”

From Michael Patrick Hicks at FanFiAddict:

“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?”

From Anna Dupre at Capes and Tights:

“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.”

From Rob Bedford at SFFWorld —

“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

Are you going on tour with this book?

Heck yeah —

(Hope to see you along the way! Except you, over there. You know who you are. YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID.) Links to the events can be found here.

“Chuck, what can I do to help?”

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.