It’s Dangerous to Go Alone: A Review of Chuck Wendig’s "The Staircase in the Woods"

By Savannah Brooks

The Staircase in the Woods, by Chuck Wendig (Del Ray, April 2025)

Within the dark depths of a sinister house, two lost friends come to a critical realization: “Maybe a ghost is just a copy.”

In the context of Chuck Wendig’s The Staircase in the Woods, published April 2025 by Del Ray, the ghosts in question are copies of haunted rooms, the final resting places for homicides, suicides, abuses, neglect. Each room comes alive, movie-like, replaying its most heinous memory and forcing anyone trapped within its walls to stand witness—or to participate. The rooms are all part of a seemingly endless, physically impossible house, a structure that transcended, then soured, its original purpose:

It may seem strange to think of a house watching anything, but when a house becomes a home, it becomes imbued with life. Alive in an almost literal way—and certainly aware. If a house becomes haunted, it is not haunted by the ghosts of its inhabitants but rather by the memories of those inhabitants—it is the house that remembers, and the house that records and replays the lives lived there.

Houses, in this way, are like vessels. Waiting to be filled up. And what fills them can spill out—be it love, be it pain, be it hate.

This sinister house is an amalgamation of that hate, and it has one mission: to create soldiers of hate, an army that decimates with blame and eradicates with shame and regurgitates fear as scripture: “To go out there and make more bad houses. More tragedy, more terror. Spread the pain like cancer. Like metastasis.”

And the house’s insidious tactic? Isolation.

The four main characters of the story—Owen, an anxious introvert who attributes his failure to launch to: Lore, a self-reliant video game designer whose genius takes her down a lonely road; Hamish, the old “fat kid” whose self-hatred turned to an addiction turned to an overdose turned to rigid self-regulation; and Nick, the surly catalyst of chaos who’s never stopped looking for their fifth and disappeared friend, Matty—were childhood best friends, a somewhat oddball group bonded together through the Covenant, a promise to always be there for one another.

But one night, they broke that Covenant.

Years prior, when they were all out camping, Matty and Lore got into a lover’s tiff, which sent Owen into a fit of jealousy, heightening tensions within the whole group. For the first time, Matty called the Covenant: earlier that evening, they’d found a mysterious staircase in the woods, and he wanted them all to explore it together. He wanted them all to be together. The golden boy of the group was finally asking for a reciprocation of the unwavering support he’d shown them all for years—and Owen, Lore, Hamish, and Nick turned their eyes down instead. Matty made the impulsive decision to run up the staircase anyway, even though it led nowhere. At least, that’s what it looked like. But when Matty crossed the threshold at the top, he vanished. Then the staircase vanished, taking him with it.

From then on, Owen, Lore, Hamish, and Nick were left with their guilt and shame and blame, and those emotions tore them apart. They grew into people with major ideological differences, people who coveted grudges, people who never forgot one another or forgave one another or quit loving one another.

They were, in short, like so many friend groups that have been severed by moral guillotines.

The Staircase in the Woods begins years after the night Matty disappeared, when Owen, Lore, Hamish, and Nick encounter the staircase again. This time, they’re determined to fulfill the Covenant and save Matty. As the four friends navigate the house, it tries to pull them apart; once they close the door to one horrific room, that same door opens to a completely different horrific room, the whole house more kaleidoscope than architecture. When Lore and Hamish get separated from Owen and Nick, the two pairs suffer much more intensely than the whole did. When Nick and Owen end up separated from each other, they both quickly crumble under the weight of the house, which evolves from showing them rooms of other people’s most gutting moments to rooms of their own most gutting moments.

Though torturous, this is a turning point for every character. Even best friends have secrets: The group knew that Owen’s dad was hopelessly cruel, but they didn’t know that Owen cut himself to deal with that cruelty. They knew Lore’s mom was never around, but they didn’t know the extent of her neglect. They didn’t see how distraught Hamish was by all the “light-hearted teasing” over his weight or how his partying had turned to coping. They didn’t know Nick’s dad was sexually abusing him.

Over their lives, these secrets cemented into their own ghastly rooms—rooms they never allowed one another into. In the house, though, they don’t have a choice: all four friends are witness to each other’s ghosts, the memories of their worst traumas. And as these scenes unfold, the friends realize that they aren’t judging one another, and they aren’t being judged by one another. Instead, there’s the grief of not having been able to do more in the past, the harbor of knowing they’re doing what they can in the present, and the promise that more will be done in the future—and that it’ll be done as a group, always.

As Owen says, “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. That’s how we’ll survive this house. That’s how we’ll get out of this place. Together, and not alone.”

All of our brains are haunted homes, filled with our worst experiences and memories. These rooms are almost always sources of shame; we’re afraid our friends and family won’t love us anymore if they see who we truly are. Political divisiveness, fear-mongering, and internet shaming only reinforce the narrative that it’s better to be alone than to subject ourselves to one another’s judgement; that it’s better to simply excise all dissenting voices, to build castles of loneliness and call ourselves kings. But in so many ways, our ghastly rooms are just copies of each other’s: templates of trauma that we cling to for individuality instead of recognizing their universality. We should see reflections of our grief in one another; it’s what makes us human.

The house in The Staircase in the Woods is the ultimate castle of loneliness, seductive in its brutal, all-consuming attention. In casting each of the four friends in their own spotlight, though, it sparks a catalyst of understanding: the scenes that the house shows them—scenes of the worst of the worst of what can barely be called humanity—aren’t what threatens to break them; that title goes to their inability to rely on each other once the house separates them. After so many years insisting they didn’t need the Covenant, it’s the one thing that can save them.

As [Lore and Hamish] headed to the door to cycle the shifting rooms—

A stray thought pinged [Lore]. A phrase from the original Legend of Zelda game. Right at the start, a cryptic old man hands Link, the protagonist, a sword. It’s just a wooden sword, but it’s enough. And when he hands it over, he says:

It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this.

It was dangerous to go alone. If Hamish were alone in here, he would’ve killed himself. If she were alone, who knows what would happen. The house would have its way, she feared.

When the group cemented the Covenant, they were making a pact: our friendship is worth fighting for. Over time, many things got in the way of that friendship, from the big—Matty’s disappearance, Hamish’s vote for a bigoted presidential candidate, Lore stealing a video game concept that Owen helped create—to the small—rejections and insults and ignorance from the past cropping up into snubs and jibes and taunts in the present. But when the group gets their second chance, they do fight for their friendship. They fight for one another.

In 2023, the World Health Organization declared loneliness a pressing global concern, and US surgeon general Vivek Murthy declared it a public health crisis—an epidemic, in fact. In his book The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the skyrocketing numbers of mental health diagnoses, hospitalizations due to self-harm, suicide attempts, and deaths by suicide since the early 2010s, a time when social paranoia (due to 9/11), fear of strangers (due to a constant news cycle), financial tension (due to the recession), and inescapable comparison (due to smartphones and social media) coalesced into a tar pit of physical and emotional isolation. Evolutionarily, Homo sapiens developed social brains, and those brains take a serious hit when we’re lonely. We’re wired for camaraderie, even when we tell ourselves we’re not.

For years, Owen, Lore, Hamish, and Nick told themselves they weren’t—at least not with each other, not anymore. But even with all the barriers to their friendship, big and small, a cryptic wise old man’s wisdom still won out. Whether you’re climbing a mysterious staircase, contemplating a big life choice, or even just a little sad: It’s dangerous to go alone. Take a friend.

Savannah Brooks

Savannah Brooks earned her MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and spent the first decade of her career working in publishing, first as an editor and then as a literary agent. Her work has been featured in the Guardian, Hobart, and Inscape, among other publications; is forthcoming from Bridge Eight Press, Prime Number Magazine, and New Plains Review; and has been nominated for a Best of the Net Award. A disabled writer suffering from the most literal of broken hearts, she lives in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, with her two black cats, Eggs Benedict and Toaster Strudel.

Copy editor: Nancy He

Intern Copy Editor: Scarlet Li