House of Stairs

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Peter, a timid, insecure child, retreats into a dream “room”: a memory of an orphanage where his friend Jasper loved and cared for him.

The writing style is not so great, and the plot is -by now- quite outdated: from the mystery (which has already been played out many times with way more interesting variations) to the frankly unnecessary final explanation. Now that I've settled this part of my childhood, I can continue reading the metafiction of my agegroup.

Lizzie hasn't seen her old friend, Bell, for some fourteen years, but when she spots her from a taxi in a London street she jumps out and pursues her despite 'all the terrible things' that passed between them. When it becomes clear that they will be fed only by escalating cruelty, the children divide into two groups. I thought I’d read this as a kid but I think it was actually a collection of Sleator’s short stories; I have very strong memories of The Elevator.

talked about feeling as if Shardlake was a friend, and I do agree, so you really feel for him and his friends. Normal life starts in the front room downstairs with innocent Auntie watching television, with Bell being her unlikely companion. From there, the story proceeds in an episodic format, offering glimpses into the characters’ past lives which help to inform their present social dynamics. He's afraid of everything and everybody, and finds solace only his the strange trances he drops into, in which he is with an old orphanage roommate, Jasper, feeling safe and protected. Reading HOUSE OF STAIRS in 2015, I found it a period piece, reflecting old-fashioned preoccupations and literary tropes.She's had to learn a lot in her time, and doesn't look to others to decide what she should or should not do. Because even children of rich parents end up in orphanages, the novel suggests human life has become so cheap that children are not cherished.

Things I wish: that I knew what happened to the fallout of the world, that I knew more about the characters’ previous lives, that I knew what happened to them after the stairs, we knew more of the characters’ inner thoughts. It follows five teenaged orphans who are abducted and placed in the house of stairs as an unethical experiment in social dynamics. They are blindfolded, taken from their group homes and dumped in a huge, brightly-lit building filled with neverending stairs, bridges and landings.This story has subtle and tantalizing hints at being set in the future after a cataclysmic event of some kind, with the mentioning of gas masks being worn near roads, synthetic food, and only the rich and powerful being able to reside in houses with real grass, whereas the mass of civilisation are housed in residential megastructures. For a while, Peter thinks that Oliver is his old friend, Jasper, and subsequently Peter is devoted to Oliver. For a while, it feeds them if they all cooperate on an elaborate dance when the lights start flashing. Elizabeth, as a passenger in a taxi spots a woman heading towards a tube station who she has not seen for nearly 20 years. now, even if i do consider this book an my all-time-favourite, i recognise that certain phrases, observations, and or lines of dialogue are decidedly representative of both of the time in which the story is set in (60s/70s england, a lot of white middle-class or otherwise well-off characters) and the time in which it was written (80s).