February 1, 2025
Bestselling Wendig (Black River Orchard) returns with another small-town horror novel. When five high school friends go on a camping trip, they find a mysterious staircase that appears to lead nowhere and disappears after one of them walks up--and doesn't come back. Twenty years later, the staircase reappears, and the four survivors go in search of their lost friend. Prepub Alert.
Copyright 2024 Library Journal
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
February 1, 2025
In 1998, five teenagers ventured into the woods of Pennsylvania and stumbled upon a mysterious staircase that led to nowhere. One climbed it, and by the end of the night, only four returned. Now, 20 years later, the survivors are shattered, each haunted by that day and with their lives in tatters. Then the staircase reappears, and the estranged friends are drawn back together. This time, driven by guilt and desperation, they resolve to climb it themselves, hoping to uncover the truth, and to perhaps reclaim the friend they lost. Wendig's disturbing novel follows the classic trope of adults confronting the horrors of unresolved childhood trauma. The ghastly atmosphere, combined with an ever-present sense of danger, creates an unrelenting tension that grips readers. The horrors within the staircase unfold like a twisted escape room, blending video game logic with cruel mind games. This is also a tale about friendship, found family, and overcoming the pain of the past, featuring a cast of broken, flawed, and at times unlikable characters who nonetheless inspire empathy. VERDICT Wendig's (Black River Orchard) latest is perfect for fans of Black Mouth by Ronald Malfi and The Dissonance by Shaun Hamill.--Andrea Dyba
Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
March 1, 2025
Four kids who swore an oath of friendship reunite as adults to face their fears. The foundation of this novel is a consciously employed trope about messed-up kids, from the Losers Club in Stephen King'sIt (1986) to more recent groupings of youth gone wrong in everything from Edgar Cantero'sMeddling Kids (2017) to Gerard Way'sThe Umbrella Academy comic-book series. Here, it's five kids from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, circa 1998: charismatic Matty, cynical Nick, carefree Hamish, cool-ahead-of-her-time Lore-n�e-Lauren, and nervous nail-biter Owen. Each burdened with terrible families, they create a pact, the Covenant: "It's how they're there for each other. How they'll do anything for each other. Get revenge. Take a beating. Do what needs doing." But when they discover the titular staircase during a camping trip and their impulsive leader Matty disappears while climbing it, the band breaks up. Decades later, Lore is a successful game designer, having abandoned Owen to his anxieties, while Hamish has become a family man and Nick is dying of pancreatic cancer. When he invokes their pact, the surviving members reassemble at a similar anomaly in the woods to make sense of it all. Climbing another staircase into a liminal space marked with signs saying "This place hates you," among other things, our not-so-merry band suddenly finds themselves trapped in a haunted house. There's plenty of catnip for horror fans as these former kids work their way through shifting set pieces--rooms where children were tortured, murdered, and worse, including some tailored specifically to them--but the adversary ultimately leaves something to be desired. The book isn't as overtly gothic asBlack River Orchard (2023) or as propulsive as his techno-thrillers, but Wendig has interesting things to say about friendship and childhood trauma and its reverberations. Lore gets it, near the end: "We're all really fucked up and just trying to get through life, and it's better when we do it together instead of alone." A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren't just kids anymore.
COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
March 1, 2025
Continuing his streak of top-flight fiction, Wendig gifts us this Gothic-tinged horror story. A group of friends is reuniting to get together one last time with Nick, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But, as it turns out, that's not the only reason Nick has summoned his old friends: they are finally, he tells them, going to find out what happened two decades earlier, during a camping trip, when one of them climbed up a staircase that was located, incongruously, in the middle of the forest and never came back. Wendig begins in the present, introducing us to the friends and their relationships with one another, before finally taking us into the past, where something inexplicable changed their lives forever. It is exactly the right choice: a past-set prologue would have ruined the suspense, would have given us too much information too soon. Another first-rate novel from an author whose imagination and talent seem to know no bounds.
COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.