The Staircase in the Woods

Chuck Wendig’s The Staircase in the Woods (2025) is an urban fantasy in which childhood friends reunite 20 years after one of their number, Matty, climbs up a supernatural staircase in the woods and disappears once he reaches the top. The remaining friends, who regret their decision not to follow him up the staircase, ascend a similar structure and find themselves trapped in a multidimensional, sentient “house” that forces them to confront all the unresolved traumas of their childhood. As they struggle to survive, their experiences demonstrate The Importance of Found Family, The Long-Term Effects of Trauma, The Pervasive Nature of Guilt, and The Duality of “Home.”

This guide refers to the 2025 Penguin Random House hardcover edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, illness, death, child death, death by suicide, child sexual abuse, child abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, bullying, racism, suicidal ideation, self-harm, mental illness, substance use, and cursing.

Plot Summary

Told from the third-person omniscient perspective, the novel alternates between the childhood experiences of five friends (Owen Zuikas, Nick Lobell, Hamish Moore, Lauren “Lore” Banks, and Matthew “Matty” Shiffman) and the fraught reunion of the four remaining friends decades after Matty’s disappearance. As teenagers, the five friends forged a solemn “Covenant” to support one another; their bond helped them to survive the abuses that they endured at school and at the hands of their family members.

One fateful day, when they are all teenagers, they decide to go camping in the woods, where they encounter a preternatural staircase to nowhere. In a fit of pique after being rejected by Lauren, Matty ignores his friends’ warnings, ascends the staircase alone, and disappears into thin air. Traumatized and at a loss, the remaining friends fabricate a story to explain Matty’s disappearance and do their best to get on with their lives, drifting apart over the years. The narrative will later reveal that each of them suffers various abuses at the hands of their family. Owen endures his father’s emotional abuse, Hamish is made to feel ashamed of his body, Lauren suffers the effects of her mother’s absenteeism and neglect, and Nick is subjected to his father’s sexual abuse. These issues, compounded with the friends’ guilt over their failure to save Matty, follow them into adulthood and haunt them.

As the novel opens, decades after Matty’s disappearance, an adult Nick contacts the other three friends and announces that he has aggressive pancreatic cancer. He invokes the Covenant, summoning Owen, Lore, and Hamish to him. Lore convinces Owen to go, even though he resents her success as a game developer because she exploited ideas that the two of them had created together. When the friends reunite, a driver takes them to the woods, where Nick leads them to a preternatural staircase just like the one that claimed Matty years ago.

After relating the events surrounding Matty’s disappearance, the narrative explains the origins of the Covenant, which began in ninth grade and sustained the five friends through the worst moments of high school.

Now, Nick admits that he doesn’t have cancer. He blames them for failing Matty, and his emotion compels them to ascend the stairs. Lore goes up first, and the others follow, finding themselves in a hallway. The staircase itself has disappeared, trapping them in an alternate dimension that consists of multiple, ever-shifting rooms that reflect the most traumatic moments of their lives and the lives of others they have never met.

A message carved into the wall announces that the place hates them. The group enters a 1990s-era girl’s bedroom, but when Hamish reopens the door they came through, the hallway has vanished, and in its place is a dining room. Lore reads from a diary in the girl’s bedroom, reporting that its owner, Marshie, was rejected by a boy she liked. When a bloodied, teenage Marshie crawls out from under the bed, Hamish, Lore, and Nick flee, but Owen is caught in the thrall of this supernatural entity. Identifying with Marshie’s story, he tells her that he wanted love too. When she suggests that they die together, he nods.

Lore rescues Owen by pulling him through the doorway. Another door opens into a greige living room that Hamish recognizes from an infamous house in which the father killed his whole family. As the friends gingerly explore the house’s various rooms and begin to experience unexplained bouts of anger at each other, they eventually realize that the sentient, malevolent house itself is creating these emotions. They realize that the house is trying to isolate them from one another, so they resolve to stay together. Lore and Hamish enter a bedroom, but Owen gets spooked by its contents (his father’s sickroom) and instinctively slams the door after them. When Nick opens the door again, the space is now a playroom, and Lore and Hamish are gone.

The friends are now separated into two pairs: Nick and Owen, and Lore and Hamish. The latter two eventually discover another message in Matty’s handwriting that reads, “THE HEART IS WHERE THE HOME IS” (203).

Meanwhile, Owen suggests that the rooms move in a pattern. They sleep for a while, and when Owen awakens, he momentarily has the impression that Nick’s eyes are like windows and that his facial features are reminiscent of architecture. As they continue to explore, they learn how to cycle through the shifting rooms until they find the one they want to enter.

Still exploring with Lore, Hamish grows certain that this is hell. He feels guilty for cheating on his wife and being cold to his children, so he punches a mirror. Lore stops him from stabbing himself, and together, they smash through the wall and find a crawlspace that does not exude the intangible malice that the rest of the house does.

As Owen and Nick snipe at each other, Owen realizes that the house is influencing their emotions. He cycles through rooms until he finds Marshie’s; when Marshie stabs him in the chest, he does not bleed, and he realizes that both Marshie and the house are illusions.

Owen and Nick find a pantry, and Owen finds evidence that Nick has been here before the other three ever arrived in the house. Nick admits that he came here alone and found Matty’s body; now, the house won’t let him go. He beats Owen and leaves him. Later, Owen feels the house trying to possess his mind; it forces him to consider murdering Nick. He cycles through the rooms until he finds a familiar basement.

In this basement, which is from his childhood, Owen sees a 15-year-old Nick crying, his belt undone; Nick’s father adjusts his own underwear. After his father leaves, the young Nick accuses Owen of never noticing what his father did to him. Owen feels worthless. He can feel the house inside him now, and he knows which room it will show him next: his dying father’s bedroom. The narrative reveals that in real life, Owen’s dying father summoned him to his sickroom just to be vicious to him one more time, so Owen killed his father by stuffing all the hospice drugs down his throat. Now, trapped in the house, Owen starts peeling away his own skin like wallpaper. As he does, Lore and Hamish find him and yank him into the safer crawlspace, away from the house’s influence.

Lore talks to the unconscious Owen, explaining that she used to think that being alone was her superpower until the Covenant made her stronger. When Owen wakes up, he explains that the house is controlling Nick, who has claimed that Matty is dead. A lot of time passes, and although they watch for Nick, the house erodes their hope. One day, while Lore and Hamish fight, Nick enters and holds a knife to Lore’s throat. When Owen asserts that Matty isn’t dead, Nick hesitates, and Hamish knocks him out.

They drag Nick into the crawlspace. Owen theorizes that the house showed Nick a vision of Matty’s death to break him. Owen confronts Nick about his father’s abuse, saying that the attacks were never Nick’s fault. Owen apologizes for not realizing the truth. The friends realize that they must stick together in order to survive.

Lore asks Nick to recall what he knows about the house. He tells them about Dan Harrow, who designed postwar housing communities. Alfie Shawcatch, an Army veteran, bought one of the homes. He and his wife moved in and had three kids, but Shawcatch, haunted by memories of the war, killed his wife and sons and burned down the house, dying in the flames himself. Nick says that whatever a house is filled with can spill out. Thus, Shawcatch’s home was reborn, cursed and aware. More homes that saw the worst of humanity joined it, forming a nexus of hate. The sentient house put staircases as portals to tempt people in. It tortured those it captured, filled them with hate, and released them back into the world to further its own ends.

Lore guesses that the original house is inside this one, and they start digging. They climb down into a chasm and arrive at a 1950s-era house, where they confront an automaton of Shawcatch, which serves as the house’s avatar. He and his family welcome Nick, who speaks in a voice that is not his own and tells his friends that they can leave while he remains. Lore, Owen, and Hamish refuse to leave without him. The lights go out and come back on, revealing automatons that look like Lore, Owen, and Hamish.

Then, a vision of Matty appears, and the possessed Nick states that the house broke Matty’s spirit by showing him that his friends abandoned him to his fate. To break the house’s influence on Nick, Lore, Owen, and Hamish begin telling stories from high school. Nick returns to himself and sets Shawcatch on fire. The four friends escape and emerge in the forest. Their luggage waits where the staircase had been.

Six months later, the group meets at a coffee shop in Wisconsin and drives to Matty’s house. In 10 years, six women in the area have gone missing, and they suspect that the house-possessed Matty is to blame. They vow to work together to save him.