House of Stairs

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At the beginning of the book she sees her old friend Bell, and follows her at a short distance, not sure it really is her. Escher makes use of geometry in most of his prints, and in this case he uses several rectangles to make the stairs and walls.

None of them know the reasons behind being put in the House of Stairs, and the machine forces them to perform acts of escalating cruelty upon one another. Five sixteen-year-old orphans find themselves in a sterile maze-like environment, consisting entirely of stairs and landings. Peter and Lola, in contrast, remove themselves to a distant part of the maze, supporting one another in the decision to starve rather than become monsters.

Straight stairs, bent stairs, spiral stairs, some stairs connected by narrow bridges, some stairs connected to nothing at all. So I would think about this book from time to time for the next 18 years, despairingly, and then I was reading a review of The Hunger Games in the New Yorker, and Laura Miller gave a quick summary of the genre of YA distopic sci-fi, and described this book with complete citations! What follows is pretty tame by today’s standards, and in my books does not hold a candle to Lord of the Flies; however, it still makes for pure, unadulterated compulsive reading.

The infighting that comes naturally becomes essential to their survival, for only when they are cruel or greedy will the machine start flashing its lights and entice them to dance. Set in an unknown but clearly dystopian future, we follow five kids in their early teens who are suddenly dumped alone on a never ending room of stairs. Guilt, culpability, love, obsession, desire, greed, past tragedies, and family legacies are recurring themes in Elizabeth's story.Some are seen to roll in through doors, wound in a wheel shape and then unroll to crawl up the stairs, while others crawl down stairs and wind up to roll out. The book begins as the five sixteen-year-olds, all orphans from different places and backgrounds, wake up one by one in the house of stairs.